Selected Amazon Reviews (Semiotext

by Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy (afterword), Wayne Koestenbaum (introduction)

704 pages, Hardcover

First published November 26, 2024

About the author

Kevin Killian was an American poet, author, and playwright of primarily LGBT literature. He is also a highly regarded editor. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, which he co-edited with Peter Gizzi, won the American Book Award for poetry in 2009. His novel, Impossible Princess, won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award as the best gay erotic fiction work of 2009. Killian is also co-founder of the Poets Theater, an influential poetry, stage, and performance group based in San Francisco.

He is married to Dodie Bellamy.

Reviews

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

to me, this is maybe the conceptual highpoint of writing in the internet age (something that readers get varying degrees of mileage out of, so that claim might not exactly be a selling point for some). A memoir through consumption history, a deterritorialization of striated space (the amazon review forums), a de facto Kevin Killian product recommendation catalogue — the book is hardly one thing, and it's kind of baffling (miraculous?) that this is even a book at all. The Koestenbaum intro and Bellamy afterword keep the thing on flexible guardrails, but I can see myself flipping around through this one in perpetuity. one of my favourite things published this year

[Clayton Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This project is gold, a perfect alchemy of context and personality. As a writer, I know the difficulty and necessity of trying to make sense of your own place in history, as any artist must, and asking how your art may or may not be representative of the broad “now”, the place and time you work from, which was given to you and not chosen. I think especially in the Information Age and onward, that line of self-inquiry swerves and curls and becomes very difficult to follow, with so much to now engage with, with so many intangible but meaningful influences on our existence, with the quotidian moving further from the material and into digital space, context, and idea. But here is a volume of writing which meets that challenge head on, and meets it easily, fearlessly, by pulling an inextinguishable joie de vivre into the unlikeliest of places for it to be fueled. This book is the breath in its authors lungs, the day to day decision one makes to live well, to live with what and who one loves, to do it with ease and to not do it alone, in the face or growing shadow of that which wishes to wring from our lives every penny it can. Cheers, Kevin. And thank you.

[Nikky Southerland]

I don't know if I'm just not the target audience (being so not culturally hip) but gosh just bounced off of this one.