Desire High Heels Red Wine

From Canada comes a lively but ultimately slim sampling of short stories and poems by four gay and lesbian writers of coffeehouse and 'zine fame. Sonja Mills's ``Thicker Skin in Thirty Minutes'' includes a short, beguiling prose piece in the form of a help-wanted advertisement for sexual partners and ``Someone to fall in love with. This miserable, mutually masochistic and hellish position is available sporadically. The pay is lousy.'' Sky Gilbert follows with a diverting series of energetic and clever satirical poems about the vagaries of gay love and sexual desire (in his ``Some Denial,'' a middle-aged man sorts through his feelings about an ex by detailing the qualities of the man he insists he no longer misses). In Timothy Archer's short story ``Closure,'' a young man on the way home from a Christmas party serendipitously accepts an offer of money for sex, with some darkly picaresque results. And in Margaret Webb's poem ``Memories of Beef,'' a woman looks back ruefully on a rural adolescence spent watching cattle raised for slaughter. What unifies the writers is their accommodation of smooth literary intellect with coarser modern erotics. Catchy pop-art design is clearly intended to make the book more appealing to a younger readership but often serves to distract from the writing. (Jan.)