Selected Amazon Reviews (Semiotext

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

A book-length selection from Kevin Killian's legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com.


An enchanting roll of duct tape. Love Actually on Blu-ray Disc. The Toaster Oven Cookbook, The Biography of Stevie Nicks, and an anthology of poets who died of AIDS. In this only book-length selection from his legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com, sagacious shopper Kevin Killian holds forth on these household essentials and many, many, many others.

The beloved author of more than a dozen volumes of innovative poetry, fiction, drama, and scholarship, Killian was for decades a charismatic participant in San Francisco’s New Narrative writing circle. From 2003–2019, he was also one of Amazon’s most prolific reviewers, rising to rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site. Alternately hilarious and heartfelt, Killian’s commentaries consider an incredible variety of items, each review a literary escapade hidden in plain sight amongst the retailer’s endless pages of user-generated content. Selected Amazon Reviews at last gathers an appropriately wide swath of this material between two covers, revealing the project to be a unified whole and always more than a lark.

Some for “verified purchases,” others for products enjoyed in theory, Killian’s reviews draw on the influential strategies of New Narrative, his unrivaled fandom for both elevated and popular culture, and the fine art of fabulation. Many of them are ingeniously funny—flash-fictional riffs on the commodity as talismanic object, written by a cast of personas worthy of Pessoa. And many others are serious, even scholarly—earnest tributes to contemporaries, and to small-press books that may not have received attention elsewhere, offered with exemplary attention. All of Killian’s reviews subvert the Amazon platform, queering it to his own play with language, identity, genre, critique.

Killian’s prose is a consistent pleasure throughout Selected Amazon Reviews, brimming with wit, lyricism, and true affection. As the Hall of Famer himself reflected on this form-of-his-own-invention shortly before his untimely passing in 2019: “They’re reviews of a sort, but they also seem like novels. They’re poems. They’re essays about life. I get a lot of my kinks out there, on Amazon.”

Genres: Nonfiction

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

[Alexa Doran · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely devoured all 668 pages of this book. My dude is so well-read, so insightful, so funny, so right the fuck up my alley. Then the Afterword will all but break your heart, taking this from amusing to amazing. My only complaint...why so much Joni Mitchell hate???? Can't fuck with "A Glass of You" and still have allllll my respect.

[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.