BOOKS
Review of Fuckscapes by Sean Kilpatrick
James Greer
01.30.12
Painterly? No that's sort of feeble for what it is. Impressionistic? Nah...getting there but... author James Greer ponders––with his own lyrical might––the right word to describe Sean Kilpatrick’s Fuckscapes (his first collection of poetry with a title con huevos). Vomitous? Yes, but bombastically beautiful in the squalor. Here's a revolutionary panorama of jarring rhythm that deserves your prompt attention.
Girls in Trouble
Winston Ward
12.26.11
Douglas Light has built a world of characters tossed into the air with a fascination for their lack of safety. Their context fails to hold them on the page, and as they arc out over the unknown, Winston Ward analyzes their doomed trajectory with one eye down the barrel of a shotgun. The hunted, haunted heroines of Light's Girls in Trouble.
The Air We Breathe: Artists and Poets Reflect on Marriage Equality
Donal Mosher
12.08.11
A party-line game of telephone in which each voice is distinct, The Air We Breathe grew by accretion into a conversation that stepped off the page into an exhibition at SFMOMA, running November 5, 2011 through February 20, 2012. Photographer and filmmaker Donal Mosher enters the pages of the formative text/collage on marriage equality from the mind of editor Apsara DiQuinzio and takes a look at what is on display, and what is at stake. The public and the private forms of exhibition and exchange are on the table.
Lay Mirrors in the Street / Bring Heaven Down to Earth: On Jen Benka's Pinko
Laura Carter
11.28.11
All the leaves fall off the trees in one night (as they do) and all the flowers come back red in the springtime. Laura Carter explores the loveliness in revolution of Jen Benka's Pinko.
Swarms of Swarms: The Awakened Space of Dennis Cooper's The Marbled Swarm
Blake Butler
10.31.11
Fanzine caught up with the always gracious Dennis Cooper in Paris this summer and was casually handed his forthcoming book The Marbled Swarm on a day we went to see Anish Kapoor's inflatable Leviathan sculpture at the Palais Royal. "It's my best yet," an understatement of humble challenge coming from America's elder statesman of trangressive literature, now a more on-than-off expat in the country of his literary heroes, France. Cooper certainly has taken his economically taught, So-Cal erotic horror mastery and cloaked it with a mashup of continental elan. A novel of cannibalism twixt the secret passages of chateaus told in a new form of language that turns ouroboros-like (cannibalistically) in on itself, we couldn't think of anyone better to unravel such a challenge than the next gen bard of sleepless nights, Blake Butler.