Under Her Skin

How often do we think about sex, our bodies and each other`s bodies - human sexuality, our individual and each other`s sexuality? As Donna Caruso notes in her wry, stark and uneasy novel, under any bland facial expression and in any banal corner of the ordinary world, people are living, breathing and seething with sex. Under Her Skin goes from the hushed primness and restrained passion of Mass to the fidgety expectancy and hostile curiosity of the doctor`s waiting room, exposing to the light the adult nature of our very human yearnings.

Caruso's prose performs for us like a clown on highwire - funny but dangerous. Her characters unselfconsciously speculate about their sexuality amid the least likely of circumstances - from early morning Mass, to the doctor's waiting room. These stories bristle with pathos beneath their apparently mundane veneers and are deadly accurate in anointing recognition to adult innocent yearnings.

Donna Caruso was born in New Jersey in 1949 and currently lives in Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan. She is the president of Incandescent Films Inc., a filmmaker, a free-lance writer, and a performer. Donna has previously published a chapbook, The Fig Tree. Her work has been honoured with the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Short Story Award, the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Non-Fiction Award, and the Prairie Fire Erotic Literary Competition Award.