Description
Book SynopsisKoestenbaum's book of poems minces memory and culture into titbits to propose a new 'nude' poetics. The collection draws upon his signature themes - stardom, scapegoating, aestheticism, nudism, exaltation - and cuts them into serial strips. Using techniques such as pointillism, mosaic, aphorism, litany and philosophical investigation, the poet trips through a memory theatre whose luminaries range from Yvonne De Carlo to Hannah Arendt and assembles melancholy tesserae into tidily stanzaic sacrificial offerings.
Trade ReviewWayne Koestenbaum’s brilliant new collection is like a lurid coloring book of “Fauvist Depravity.” Playfully perverse, his poems reinvent the lyrical, satirical barb for our moment. And they’re as telling as they are outrageous. Where else could we meet “the Mrs. Robinson of Abstract Expressionism” or experience the joy of biting “the wolfman’s wombat ass.” This scholar of excess is off the cuff, over the top, and always on the money! Elaine Equi Like a desiccated David Markson novel, this addictively readable book of minimalist pop koans welds the body to the page. Strained through dreamspace, refracted by mediaspace and enacted in meatspace, these poems refute stability and certainty, opting instead for the irrefutable vageries of Koestenbaum's exquisitely tuned subjectivity. Kenneth Goldsmith
Wayne Koestenbaum’s brilliant new collection is like a lurid coloring book of Fauvist Depravity.” Playfully perverse, his poems reinvent the lyrical, satirical barb for our moment. And they’re as telling as they are outrageous. Where else could we meet the Mrs. Robinson of Abstract Expressionism” or experience the joy of biting the wolfman’s wombat ass.” This scholar of excess is off the cuff, over the top, and always on the money! Elaine Equi Like a desiccated David Markson novel, this addictively readable book of minimalist pop koans welds the body to the page. Strained through dreamspace, refracted by mediaspace and enacted in meatspace, these poems refute stability and certainty, opting instead for the irrefutable vageries of Koestenbaum's exquisitely tuned subjectivity. Kenneth Goldsmith
