Don Quixote: A Novel (Acker, Kathy)

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Customer Reviews

Don Quixote wanders through a Hieronymus Bosch painting...
At the core of this novel Kathy Acker states the dilemma succinctly thus: "It can't be mistaken to need someone else to love and yet only human solitariness allows human survival." On every level--the personal, the social, the psychological, the political, the cosmic--this paradox is replayed in Acker's hallucinogenic deconstruction of Cervantes' classic. Of course, there's very little resemblance to the original *Don Quixote* in this postmodern remake--the knight is a woman, the country is America, Sancho Panza is a dog, Nixon is president, and if the Apocalypse hasn't already come it can't be worst than what's already here.

But, in spite of it all, wandering haphazardly through this wasteland, Acker's Quixote is still searching for love, communication, and freedom--each and all of which seem to be impossible given human nature and the repressive political, social, and sexual relationships that arise naturally out of our survival-oriented hardwiring for power and domination over others. Patriarchy is to blame for how things are now, but Acker doesn't seem to hold out much hope for how they might be under a matriarchy. Her knight has given up on men, but can't feel the transcendent union she seeks, the transformative love-experience, with women, even if they are safer (safer because she can't truly love them.) Is love a lie, an illusion? Are we condemned to loneliness, silence, despair? Is a retreat into ourselves rather than a quest into the world the only viable road for the seeker now that all roads have been traveled, all leading to the same dead end?

Acker paints a grim--if darkly comic--picture in this anti-classic--a sustained nightmare of violence, perversion, sexuality, and criminality written in the style of assemblage: part dream, part journal, part political rant, all Acker. Like all her texts, *Don Quixote* will offend the morally, sexually, and politically sensitive of every stripe. Acker belongs to no party--she's fiercely and defiantly individualistic. Those dependent on a straightforward narrative will likewise be disappointed. Acker's idea of a novel doesn't include characters with only one identity or events which follow logically in sequence, or even one style of writing. The reader comes across plays, poems, mini-history lessons, rewrites of DeSade and more--it's as if her Don Quixote had put together a scrapbook of all he'd seen and experienced on his quest through Hell.

And yet, while *experimental* literature can all-too-often be clinical and coldly detached in its ironic and metafictional self-consciousness, Acker writes with real heart and a deep, almost willfully naïve, conviction in her own pursuit of the ideals of love, freedom, and art. Acker's despair at not being loved or understood by anyone may indeed be justified by the facts of her (and our collective human) existence, but in *Don Quixote* she has at least communicated the despair shared by all of us fellow quixotes who've suffered the realization of the nature of how things are.

In an earlier review, I claimed *my mother, a demonology* to be Acker's masterpiece, but *Don Quixote* surpasses it as an example of Acker at her best. Disguised as an outrageous parody of a classic, it's a classic in its own right.

2008-07-02 | Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore Romeo* and *61 Bang* (New York City) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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Postmodern bliss
Kathy Acker is a truly unique writer. She blends classics, politics, surrealism, autobiographical elements, raw emotion, graphic, "pornographic" scenes, humor and much more into strange, memorable and sometimes confusing postmodern literature. Beacause the author often doesn't follow the laws of a linear plot her works can be difficult to get into. But it's worth the effort. There's nothing like Acker's writing.

2005-05-25 (Perth, WA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Great!
If you're on the lookout for a for an unconventional, surreal, thoughtful, shocking, hilarious, crude, sensitive, and generally disconcerting novel/literary analysis/ treatise/social commentary, check out Acker's _Don Quixote_ and you won't be disappointed.

Reading and digesting Acker's work can occassionally feel strenuous...this is due to the sheer unconventionality of the novel, but the end result yeilds (often hilarious) new insight and is always worth the effort. The piece is a unique blend of politics and fantasy that is highly entertaining and never mainstream. Highly reccomended.

1998-12-29 | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 4

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Great Expectations: A Novel (Acker, Kathy)

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Customer Reviews

the urge to destroy is a creative urge
In this novel Acker aims her critique at the gnarly intersection of capitalism, violence, sexual dysfunction, and male dominance. In order to live out this critique, Acker jettisons most of the (male-dominated) traditions of narrative as she writes, systematically disrupting the stability of characters and setting, and rejecting the claim to authorial originality (as you might guess from the title). Some might say that this rejection is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but I'm more inclined to say it's form following function. Exemplary.

2006-05-08 (imaginaryyear.com) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 4

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a wonderful but difficult book
kathy acker doesn't cut any corners - ever. great expectations might shock you, might offend you, might even hurt and disturb you. but acker can deconstruct sexuality and eroticism and living like no one else can, and you might learn a lot about yourself and this rough, confusing existence.

1999-11-03 | Helpful Votes: 8 | Rating: 5

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Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker (Acker, Kathy)

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• ISBN13: 9780802139214
• Notes: BUY WITH Self-reliance, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and serving to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
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Kathy Acker pushed literary boundaries with a vigor and creative fire that made her one of America's preeminent experimental writers and her books cult classics. Now Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper have distilled the incredible variety of Acker's body of work into a single volume that reads like a communique from the front lines of late-twentieth-century America. Acker was a literary pirate whose prodigious output drew promiscuously from popular culture, the classics of Western civilization, current events, and the raw material of her own life. Her vision questions everything we take for granted -- the authority of parents, government, and the law; sexuality and the policing of desire -- and puts in its place a universe of polymorphous perversity and shameless, playful freakery. Spanning Acker's '70s punk interventions through more than a dozen major novels, Essential Acker is an indispensable overview of the work of this distinctive American writer and a reminder of her challenge to and influence on writers of the future. "Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know." -- Tom LeClair, The New York Times Book Review

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Blood and Guts in High School: A Novel (Acker, Kathy)

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• ISBN13: 9780802131935
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Customer Reviews

Quick, witty, and widely varying in quality
Pros: Like most of the books I've been reading lately (Gulliver's Travels, The Gallic Wars, Gardens of the Moon) this book contains some brilliant prose. The parts where Acker deconstructs the Scarlet Letter, comments on capitalist language, and provides the philosophy of the slave trader are particularly good. Even in less coherent passages, it is at least vivid. It is also short.

Cons: Its brevity is a good thing because also like most of the books I've been reading lately, over half the novel is pointless. In this case, the narrative gets so abstract that you can just skip over anything that begins to repeat itself or that makes no sense. Also in this case, the answer as to why the author chose to do this is in the novel - its a rebellion against capitalist interest. The language is intentionally bad to deny the very people it is criticizing. If you bought the book, as I did, you are the scum she is talking about. Most people won't like this sort of criticism, and even if they do, as I did, it was still a pretty big waste of time. In a way, I love that this novel is pulling down every reader that picks it up. I can respect that kind of spite.

Summary: If you read this novel, you are its victim. If you are interested in that, then by all means read it. It wont be a pleasant journey, but you maybe satisfied anyway.

2009-10-23 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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It started to be good, but got worse.
I've always been a bookworm, thirsty to read almost anything that wasn't crappy formula fiction, but I hated this book. It teases with the beginnings of a story, and with sexually-themed illustrations that appear to be meant to shock (personally, though, I am difficult to offend, so for me, they were just an interesting addition). I thought I was going to like the story, I really did. After awhile, though, it degenerates into hard-to-follow nonsense.

The second half of the book was almost unbearable for me, with its fragmented, barely-existent plot and its jumping around to different formats. I like to get sucked into a story, to feel compelled by it, but the dissonance between the different parts and formats kept jerking me out of the story's world to the point where I could barely keep track of what was happening. After awhile, I gave up, and just skipped the last few pages.

I would throw it in the recycling bin, but seeing the good reviews on here, some people seem to like it, so maybe I'll just drop it off at the thrift store where someone who knows they like it can by it, and someone taking a chance won't waste more that 50 cents.

2009-10-11 | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Not Impressed
I am either too literal, too linear, too unimaginative, too normal, or some combination therein, to find anything remotely advantageous about reading this book, other than being prepared for class (it's required reading). I was not shocked, disgusted, horrified, entertained, touched, enthused, enraged, or enraptured. Maybe a little frustrated.

I will definitely be keeping this one in the bathroom. Not for reading, but in case I run out of T.P.

Guess I'm just not progressive enough to "get it."

Here's the one I couldn't put down: Shock & Awe (Macmillan New Wrting)

2008-10-04 | pvlgize | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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Finished it on an airplane...really cool! (Actually "in")
Excellent book. While my perfect rating (not that it matters) may drop over time, this was a jarringly satisfying read, one where the slipstream sexual complexity of all the smattered nonsense makes the cliches within (esp. at the end) all the more simple, profound, and resonant. It's something of an immature work perhaps, but I sort of think of it as the author really burying herself within the main character and speaking and thinking and expressing as she would, not that I think the novel should be understood merely as the record or diary of the protagonist. The book's language speaks in fits and starts, in diatribes and metaphors and irritating aphorisms. And tangential stories. And movie script. Poetry. Lessons. Pictograms. And jokes. It's stark. It's naked. It's pissed off. It's juvenile. And it's really refreshing. It's hardly perfect and I'm anxious to get into some of the author's other work in hopes of a more "fully realized" (whatever that means) novel. But to say that the lack of linearity or the somewhat prevalent vulgarity are liabilities of this book is to miss the point ENTIRELY. And the experience. I'd like to say that I read a lot but I don't. I'm a big music and film nerd and I generally take to the experimental or violent within each. So this book was right up my "alley". The only thing I could think to compare it to is Naked Lunch which is great. Anyway, it did touch a nerve in me and spoke to some kind of inner abused adolescent girl even if that makes me a fake bourgeois tourist. So what. The world is effed up and it was in 1977 and it is now. There's so much fake snobbery and indifference and condescending solutions. I think that's what the book decries and is ABOUT more than anything else. That and the fact that we desperately, foolishly, tirelessly make for ourselves our own embittering prisons. If you're a big prude don't read this stuff. Or rent horror movies. I'm sick of seeing people whine online about how offensive some piece of literature or film is. Yeah, thanks for the informed and creative warning, buddy! I didn't find this particular book to be all that offensive or vulgar anyway. It's no American Psycho, which really did churn my stomach and though I liked it, I certainly think Acker reveals a much greater and more perceptive moral sensibility in this book than does Ellis in his. What's the big deal with an old penis here and there? Anyway, don't read it if you're a whiny prude because we don't need to hear your complaining. But yes, very excellent. A real page-turner!!!!!!

2007-04-06 (Colorado Springs) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Acker's most accessible book
The previous reviews have said that smart people like it and dumb people don't; I don't think that's true. Someone else said that it should be thrown on the floor because it's filth. I don't think that's true either.

I think that Acker had a gift for writing, but she let her obsession with sex and her need to shock get in the way of it. Several parts in this book shine with something that seems very real and honest - the part about getting an abortion ("I love it when men take care of me"); her detailed interpretation of The Scarlet Letter; the sections where she discusses the fact that women writers are plagiarists, because they can only use the words that men have written before them, for centuries.

But in between all of these flashes of brilliance is a lot of monotonous c-words and f-words and endless repetition of sexual humiliation. It's my opinion that if she had left most of that out, she could have been a great and major writer. Not because I'm morally opposed to the vulgarity, but because it's really boring after awhile. So it's ironic that the extreme vulgarity of her work is probably what made her famous - she attracted attention with shock value, but her work is ultimately, in my view, weakened by the shocking aspect of it.

I thought one quote of Janey's, where she's talking to Jean Genet, explains pretty well why Acker persisted in writing obscene scenes:
"I know where we're travelling, Genet, and I know why we're travelling there. It's not just to travel, but it's so those others who kicked me out have a chance of being at peace, having a chance of knowing the land of the monster without going there.
Genet: Do you think that's possible?"

I think Genet's question is the central one to ask of all of Acker's works. Does she succeed in taking the reader to a place of degradation and filthy, raw, animal-like sex scenes, as she intends to? And if she succeeds at that, does the reader really want to go there, to the land of the monster? I suppose my opinion of the book is biased because I only want to peek into the land of the monster, and then I wish Acker to move on and tell an engrossing story with her unique and honest observations instead.

Overall, I think this is her most accessible book because the sex is not as nonstop as it is in Great Expectations or some of her others. But to me, it's frustrating to read Blood and Guts in High School because of the passages that make it so clear that she was capable of writing a much better, concise, and more focused book.

2007-02-05 (Las Angelos California) | Helpful Votes: 11 | Rating: 3

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Literal Madness: Three Novels: Kathy Goes to Haiti; My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Florida (Acker, Kathy)

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Customer Reviews

Kathy goes to Haiti.
Kathy goes to Haiti. Every man wants her to be his wife. A man takes her home. She is his wife. She cries. Little kids laugh at her. She goes somewhere else. Different men want Kathy as their wife. She doesn't let the first one take her home. Kathy is learning.

2000-04-27 (san francisco) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 5

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Early Feminist Hyperreal Novels: Best of a New Genre in Fict
Kathy Acker has become known as the queen of punk feminist fiction. With Literal Madness she solidified that position. Three short texts unrelated to each other but connected by the quest metaphor. Of the three, Kath Goes to Haiti -- a pseudo-biographical piece -- calls for the most sustained interest. It is ostensibly a travel book adventure in the third world, but ultimately its quest is the undermining of linear narrative. Acker is a storyteller of the postmodern, disjuctive type. She short-circuits the narrative line in order to call the reader's attention to the discontinuous nature of our lives in/as fiction. She creates a hyperreality in Haiti, transforms place into text, and thereby questions the so-called reality principle. When her alter-ego "Kathy" discovers that Haiti is more a state of mind than a Caribbean island, the disjuncture in the text becomes sensible and senseless at the same time. The effect is surreal; but hyperreality (Jean Baudrillard's term) and surreality have in common elments of discontinuity and therfore serve to disorient the reader. Anyone looking for a 'good, old-fashion story' will have to look elsewhere because Acker's book satisfies none of the traditional reader's desires for linear regularity and certain expectability as to what stories do. Labeled pseudo-pornography, Kathy Goes to Haiti and other texts by Acker certainly do contain pornographic elements. But it soon becomes clear to the careful reader that what is at work in her fiction is the question of what pornography "means," especially for women. Can it be a tool to deconstruct itself? Can women themselves use it -- as Acker does -- to undermine its negative effects for women? Literal Madness is a great introduction to these questions for those willing to suspend their need for normal narrative development and to follow Acker through an acrobatics of word and scene, an at times insane juxtaposition of seemingly disparate materials that echo the disparity of our everyday lives and of our dreams. R. L. Mazzola, Robercind@aol.co

1997-07-10 | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 5

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In Memoriam to Identity (Acker, Kathy)

Description

Kathy Acker's characteristically outrageous, lyrical, and hyperinventive novel concerns three characters who share an impulse toward self-immolation through doomed, obsessive romance. Teetering somewhere between the Beats and Punk, IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY is at once a revelatory addition to, and an irreverent critique of, literature of decadence and self-destruction.

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Customer Reviews

A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
A Review of IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY
by Dr. Joseph Suglia

Resonating with the title of Kathy Acker's most mature work, IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY (1990), is the notion that the self is inseparable from its own becoming-other, from the forms that it assumes and the masks that it dons. The book serves as a series of largely disconnected epitaphs to a discarded concept of identity---that is, to "identity" conceived as transcendental and substantialized subjectivity that endured unchanged through time and exist a priori independently of all relations to the other. What Acker's book suggests, in a manner that seems disjointed and even at times haphazard, is that personal identity is based on the exposure to the other person that is revealed by sexuality (the final and perhaps most significant word of the book).

Three cycles of narrative intersect with each other: 1.) A willfully anachronistic and reconstructive transcription of Rimbaud's biography (broken off arbitrarily when Acker grew disgusted with the poet's imperialist conversion) interspersed with references to AIDS and postmodernist theorist Jean Baudrillard (here decried as a cynic), deliberate mistranslations of Rimbaud's verse, and intentionally unacknowledged citations from Buechner, Lautreamont, and Artaud---members of the counter-tradition of subversive literature within which Acker would like to insert herself. Of foremost importance is Rimbaud's impassioned relationship to Verlaine, who is compelled to choose between a socially unacceptable liaison with the boy and his responsibilities as a father, husband, and member of the bourgeoisie. The narrative is set against the background of the Franco-German War of 1870. According to the logic of Acker's repoliticization, the Germans appear as yuppies who wage a ceaseless battle against the unemployed and arrogate to themselves services that only they can afford. 2.) A narrative oriented around Airplane, a young girl who exists in a relationship of absolute dependency to her rapist (later nominated as her "boyfriend")---a relationship that mirrors, despite Acker's own self-interpretive claims, Rimbaud's relationship to Verlaine. She is inexorably driven to dance at a strip club. 3.) A transformative replication of Faulkner's THE SOUND AND THE FURY that concerns the sexually voracious Capitol, who is erotically obsessed with her brother Quentin. Her goal, to couple with every man in the world, is the indirect endeavor to achieve sexual congress with her brother, the only man who matters to her. Capitol is the pure desire to consume men, the will to conquer through copulation; she generalizes her male sexual partners to the point at which they are reduced to nothing. Because Capitol can never remember any of the men with whom she couples (and does not exercise any discrimination in her choices), she not only erases these men as individual human beings: by eliding all memory, she effectively destroys her self as an identity that would persist through time. She "herself," a female Don Giovanni (and this is the joint that links her narrative to the Rimbaud section), is "No One": non-identical with herself, "she" is a multiple series of drives to overcome men through sexuality. 4.) "The Wild Palms" alternates successively between the narrative of Airplane and that of Capitol; both narratives are sutured together in counterpoint (this is a Faulknerian practice).
To love, in each context, is to demolish and shape one's personal history. The work is an extended, productive commentary on Rimbaud's dictum, "Je suis un autre." The most productive point of departure for an analysis of this work would be the first narrative, which concerns this dictum most directly. Rimbaud longs to free himself not merely from the self that he is and has been, but from the stability of identity in general: "*I* want to die..."

Rimbaud prefers "the vulnerability of real identity" to the bourgeois self (a pre-existing self that would be identical with itself). R.'s identity is, strictly speaking, a non-identity: he is a multiple series of selves rather than the self-sameness of the unique self that would come before all others. His desire to become other-than-himself, to be exteriorized as his own double, is inextricably bound to his relation to V. Identity is both constituted and destroyed by the sexual relation.

It is a relation that gives rise to the most intense experience of pain. Sexuality is not absolute communion, the fusion of the self and the Other, but rather absolute loneliness: what is most distinctive about the sexual relation is the *absence* of all bonds between the persons involved. Whereas R.'s relationship to V. is one of submission, fragility, and addiction, the latter's relationship to the former is something that could be reduced to a moral decision... One witnesses a certain dissymmetry in the relation between R. and V. in scene after scene of this work. What marks their rapport is the fact that this relation is unequal and without a future. The hopelessness of the relation belongs to it essentially and defines both of its members. Love becomes, as well, synonymous with coercion, the penetration of rape, and the agony of torture...

R. hates to desire V. He desires V. because he hates V., because he is killing him. He discovers love through pain and this is the only experience that would allow him to demolish identity altogether.

When V. withdraws from R.'s life altogether in order not to be named a "homosexual," R. accedes to another relation... It is at this point that R. renounces poetry and pronounces poetry's end---although one cannot assign a precise date, August 1873, for instance, to this renunciation and pronouncement---and is transformed utterly... It is not as if Rimbaud discarded his past self as if it were an old shell and entered into a new one (that of an arms dealer and ivory trader). What is affirmed is the esential instability and uncertainty of all identity: that the "I" is already the "Non-I."

The renunciation of poetry corresponds precisely to the renunciation of Verlaine and what he represents: the self-sameness of subjectivity conceived as substance. Such is Acker's implicit explanation of R.'s alleged "silence"---which was not a form of silence at all, but the accession to another order of writing. It is not merely the case that R. has broken with his past self and is transmuted into an imperialist (such is a conclusion that Acker has rejected). He enters into an experience in which the self is continually annihilated and reformed, an experience in which the self proliferates into a series of duplicable selves or non-selves. R.'s narrative ends with the affirmation of an *other* consciousness: not a new consciousness that would supersede one that would come before it, but a consciousness that is always entirely other-than-itself. R.'s apparent renunciation of poetry, mistyped as his "silence," was in fact a phenomenological turn toward the experience of the self as an other.

All of Acker's work is severely flawed and IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY is no exception. But these flaws are tied to the success of her densely individuated style. Acker's "bad writing" (and carelessness is in evidence here---I have seldom read a book with more typographical and syntactical errors) may be read, charitably, as a mark of her iconoclasm, her refusal to fashion a well-crafted masterpiece that would be accepted within the canon of traditional literary history. Unfortunately, the stylization of the narrative is not immune to this prctice. The description of the relationship between R. and V. is, I'm afraid, only intermittently compelling and tends to veer toward mere compilation and summary of biographical data. The deadpan repetition of "facts" from R.'s life denies any pathetic identification on the part of the reader. This, in itself, would not be disturbing if pathos were not what IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY were all about. The work is most impressive when Acker gives herself over to the desire, however juvenile, to shock her audience and approximates the punk sensibility of her vastly inferior early novel, BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL (1980), while bringing to the work a far greater intelligence. And yet the work lacks the critical naivete that made Acker's early writing powerful. Most troubling in this regard are the frequent intrusions of Acker the Professor and Literary Theorist into the space of the narrative. Everything proceeds as if the author had surfeited herself with postmodern theory to the point at which she could only write narratives fraught with savvy, self-interpretive statements. She *anticipates* the interpretation of her work in the hands of her informed readership. IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY thus takes on the strange appearance of a book that reads itself.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

2009-11-14 | The Greatest Author in the World | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Achingly beautiful
Acker is not for everyone, but if you're a fan or a literary fiction reader or open to Acker's wild ride through language and heartbreak and sensuality, I highly recommend this novel. Her language is never more distilled and powerful than here, if you have the ears for it. One of my very favorite Acker books, and obviously I'm a fan.

2009-04-03 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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My God, It's Horrible!
Okay, perhaps I'm just not as "punk" as I used to be (or consider myself), but this was instantly the worst book I've read -- well, skimmed through -- in recent memory. It is one of the few times I've ever "walked out" on a book, because it was simply unreadable.

Perhaps in 1992 this would have been considered shocking and oh-so-postmodern, but today it seems ridiculously contrived in its attempts to use offensive language, and to blur lines of pseudohistorical drama and political tracts, that it's actually laughable. Acker proves herself the queen of the non-sequitur; as these non-characters explore their useless, sex-and-violence-based relationships, they'll throw in comments about the smell of their ..., or half-baked sociopolitical theories for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON. One fun game is to count how many times a character will use the phrase "I love you" or "I hate you," with no provocation whatsoever -- somehow it reminds me of awful Italian modernist movies from the 60's. At first, her awkward style is mildly intriguing, but about 20 pages in you realize that Acker relentlessly continues in this vein, ad absurdum.

You will get NOTHING out of this novel. No insight, or even much entertainment, I expect. Perhaps for some historical value, that is, to rediscover what kind of ... people were fawning over back when postmodernism was still hot in academic (not so much artistic) circles. But nowadays, it's just a joke.

2001-06-26 | Bubblejet-Slangin' Coolster Extra-Ordinary (Toronto, ON) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 1

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Exploring Ghastly Inner States In A Painfully Esoteric Style
This book was just way over my head. I was impressed with Acker's ability to vividly expose the true inner monologues of her characters, but I just didn't grasp the point or even what was going on half the time. This book just totally bummed me out, and left me confused.

1999-06-18 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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kathy acker takes on rimbaud
kathy deconstructs rimbaud, baudelaire, and faulkner in this beautiful mess of a book. it tells the tale of the ill-fated relationship between rimbaud and baudelaire and asks if being alone is better than being in a relationship that isn't supposed to be. it also retells faulkner's sound and the fury in an updated, perverse manner. 'come alive dead heart, and sing...' kathy's approach is never subtle, and is not recommended for those easily offended, but when you accept the dirtiness, all of the beauty seeps in.

1998-12-14 | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 5

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