Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background

by Wayne Koestenbaum

Fast, obsessive, jumpy, tender, and joyful, the poems in Wayne Koestenbaum's Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background take his signature themes—stardom, scapegoating, aestheticism, nudism, exaltation—and cut them into serial tidbits that employ techniques of pointillism, mosaic, grid, aphorism, litany, and philosophical investigation. The luminaries in this memory-theater range from Yvonne de Carlo to Hannah Arendt. A trip to Venice and an invocation to an eschatological ice-cream man are the two longest trysts in a book exquisitely composed of "bits" that betoken a new brutalism in a writer known for svelte cadences and artful dodges.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2012

About the author

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of critical prose, including The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and three books of poetry, including Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Reviews

[Zack]

I just realized that I read this whole book thinking it was written by another person. A friend recommended a poet with a similar looking name and I got the names confused. But I finished this book. And it was pretty good. What a weird experience. Does anyone read these reviews? How are you?

[Tuck · Rating 3 out of 5]

so many nouns (as blurb says) but and verbs too. and liza minelli is all over this thing. here's an excerpt of "the book of scapegoats"

....
Grandmother pressed her groin
into my thigh. I reciprocated.

She said homosexuality
was a no-no. Otherwise tolerant

she amused herself with Aeschylus
near and orchard's admonishment.


...

quite a bit more like that with lookouts with walter benjamin, liza minnelli (lots), circe, wittgenstein, schoberg, faust, kim novak....

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is hallucinatory and strange, but worth a look. Koestenbaum does that thing Burroughs experimented with where you take random lines and paste them together to see what comes of it. The results are sometimes nonsense and sometimes surprising.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The playfulness here is more grounded than Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, the fragments more cohesive despite their jumpiness. It feels like a more developed work in general, an evolution not at all dissimilar from that previous book but much better in delivery.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was the only Koestenbaum book at the library I was at, and something tells me it was the wrong one to start with. Last three poems are great, the rest are just fine.

[Frank Karioris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to order another book of poetry. Thats how I would 'review' this.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 4 out of 5]

The leaps! The speed! Every sentence in this collection is smarter than me. I loved the chopped up fragments. The whole thing felt like one long poem booming with curiosity and fascination and life.

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wayne Koestenbaum is definitely well read and his poems reflect this. His free associated poems are more the 'echo' of our zeitgeist - that frenetic rush that defines the ebb and flow of our collective existence. I find his poems almost a hybrid of existentialism and surrealism presented in haiku format - very original. Very adult topics covered in many poems.

[Natania · Rating 5 out of 5]

Koestenbaum's poems in this volume give immense pleasure. They stimulate the intellect and the funny bone. He is a Shakespearean wordsmith with a huge range of allusion and vocabulary, from high to low, serious to frivolous. The poems are aphoristic, sometimes surrealistic, always stimulating.