What if the only kind of love you understood was one that shattered taboos? What if your very first romance drowned you in a whirlpool of transgression? A coming-of-age novel that is minutely in tune with the hungers of its narrator's body, The Skin Is the Elastic Covering that Encases the Entire Body defies category. It follows a teenage boy named Bjorn who cuts into his flesh to find relief from his depressed mother and the sexual desires that frighten him. Bjorn begins a sadomasochistic affair with an older man that promises healing, but instead it only harms him further. In a spiraling, desperate search for understanding, Bjorn struggles through grief - and pushes his flesh to its limits. Called 'a feverish combination of stream of conscious, autobiography, collage, and narrative' by Entropy Mag, The Skin marks the arrival of a truly original literary voice. Reminiscent of Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, it is as omnivorous as the bodies within it, as unrestrained as the appetites, terrors, and trysts that celebrated author Bjorn Rasmussen evokes in poetic detail. Deeply emotional, erotic, elegiac, and pansexual, it caresses the wounds we visit upon our body and soul in an attempt to serve the urges of our largest organ - the skin that covers and defines us.
