Messy and urgent with frequent flourishes of brilliance. It brought to mind Delany at moments as well as Chitty's Sexual Hegemony. Gay sex may not be the transformative act some people seem to posit it as, but in Purnell's work we find that it still contains multitudes -- in what role it plays in the life of the individuals and what it conveys about the lovers, the loved, and those longing but unloved. What appetite, what emptiness, what hurt, what hope, what expedition, what discovery, what is buried and unearthed.