Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, Series V

by Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Jean Sénac

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Poetry History & Criticism. Poetics. Translation. California Interest. African & African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Featuring Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and Jean Sénac. Edited by Gabrielle Kappes, Alex Wermer-Colan, Zohra Saed, and Kai Krienke, with General Editor Ammiel Alcalay.

LOST & THE CUNY POETICS DOCUMENT INITIATIVE publishes unexpected, genre-bending works by important 20th century writers. Unearthed from personal and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, these materials are edited by doctoral students at the Graduate Center, CUNY. LOST & FOUND SERIES V is a collection of 5 chapbooks featuring Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, Langston Hughes, and Jean Sé four major writers responding to sweeping socio-political shifts around the globe. While working at a strip club in Times Square in 1972, Kathy Acker writes Homage to Leroi Jones and other "exercises," as part of an effort to map her "total present consciousness." In The Travel Agency is on Fire , William S. Burroughs performs cut-ups on authors related to his personal canon and ranging from William Shakespeare to Anthony Burgess. Across the ocean, Algerian poet Jean Sénac writes Le soleil sous les armes [The Sun Under the Weapons], a revolutionary manifesto urging for nothing short of total cultural transformation. Traveling between Moscow to Tashkent in 1932, Langston Hughes befriends, photographs, and translates the works of young poets writing in Uzbek in his travelogues, excerpted here as part of Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan . Edited, annotated, and with accompanying essays, The London Review of Books calls this "a serious and worthy enterprise." Diane di Prima calls the series "a gold mine" and Joanne Kyger "What a brilliant cast of characters. Just exactly what one (myself) would like to read."

SERIES V

Kathy Homage to Leroi Jones (ed. Gabrielle Kappes)

Jean Sé The Sun Under the Weapons, Correspondence & Notes from Algeria (Parts I & II) (ed. Kai Krienke)

Langston Poems, Photos & Notebooks from Turkestan (ed. Zohra Saed)

William S. The Travel Agency is on Fire (ed. Alex Wermer-Colan)

300 pages, Paperback

First published June 23, 2015

About the author

Born of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.

Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.