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The first biography of poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965), a key figure in San Francisco’s gay cultural scene and in the development of American avant garde poetries.
At last a major anthology of New Narrative, the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to change writing forever.
A post-modern stream-of-consciousness fictional memoir of a gay author.
“An extraordinary collection . . . Like the work of Emily Dickinson and W. B. Yeats, Spicer’s poems still seem to come from somewhere else.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Winner of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Award for Poetry (2009) Winner of the American Book Award (2009) In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and ’60s, though in many ways Spicer’s innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and th...
“Whatever his subject matter, Killian maintains full authority—offering up a homoerotic interpretation of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and a brilliant imagined history of Hank Williams. Here, under the author’s careful control and easygoing charisma, everything seems up for grabs, and almost anything seems possible.”—Time Out New York Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.
Shy is the story of Harry Van. It's 1974, summertime, Long island. Three demanding people are about enter Harry's life and change it for good. "Gunther Fielder" is not his name; he's on the run, from his wealthy Manhattan society life, from a misguided engagement, from a terrible crime. Paula Theale is the best friend Harry Van has ever made, and they've known each other three weeks. Together they're ready to follow their favorite rock star's command. Kevin Killian is writing his first novel. Kevin can't forget the life or death of his great love Mark McAndrew, but when Harry Van comes into his life he gets shyer and shyer by the minute. These hungry people converge from difference corners of sexuality during one explosive summer. Dickensian in scope, Shy take Harry Van from a series of squalid foster homes to the strangest summer of his life. He doesn't know much, but he wants to know love's total expression.
Poetry. "Kylie Minogue, more than muse, is K. K.'s aesthetic m.o., his ammo. Around her name and image, he circulates the particles of his own uncanny idiom, which is unlike anything in contemporary American poetry. Killian works every instrument in the band; he sneaks up behind meaning, and makes it sing. Somehow, in the midst of defamiliarization, Killian's voice remains companionable and comforting. ACTION KYLIE is a book I will turn to when I want to remember that literature can regenerate authenticity as well as renege it. Killian plays with multiple rhetorics and codes, all in the pursuit of his own school of Action Poetry, in which I wish quickly to enroll"—Wayne Koestenbaum.
A new collection of essays from Dodie Bellamy on disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working-class life, aesthetic values, and profound embarrassment. So. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back? Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart. --Dodie Bellamy, "Hoarding as Ecriture" This new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which t...
In his first collection of poetry, novelist Kevin Killian views the horrors of the AIDS pandemic through a narrow prism, the films of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento. Argento Series is structured like a horror film, populating deadpan reportage with badly drawn "characters" whose grisly deaths nevertheless come as an apocalyptic shock. For twenty years Killian's friends have been dying like flies--four flies on gray velvet, to borrow one of Argento's titles. And not only his friends, but millions of untold strangers, a catastrophe of such enormity that poetry itself gasps in its wake, deaf, blind, and speechless. Killian's poems are deceptively simple, quiet, and lyric, until the creaky melodrama of the giallo makes its entrance, screaming, like a virus--then the language shrieks and trembles. Argento Series is a testament to human suffering, a curse on the bureaucratic blindness that allows it to spread and grow, a call to political action unlike any other.
Bellamy's debut novel revives the central female character from Bram Stoker's Dracula and imagines her as an independent woman living in San Francisco during the 1980s. Hypocrisy's not the problem, I think, it's allegory the breeding ground of paranoia. The act of reading into--how does one know when to stop? KK says that Dodie has the advantage because she's physical and I'm "only psychic." ... The truth is: everyone is adopted. My true mother wore a turtleneck and a long braid down her back, drove a Karmann Ghia, drank Chianti in dark corners, fucked Gregroy Corso ... --Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker First published in 1998, Dodie Bellamy's debut novel The Letters of Mina Harker...