Dodie Bellamy

Kevin Killian

At last a major anthology of New Narrative, the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to change writing forever.

New Narrative Writing 1977-1997

Writers who Love Too Much

Selected Amazon Reviews

A memoir of gay life in 1970s Long Island by one of the leading proponents of the New Narrative movement. Fascination brings together an early memoir, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and a previously unpublished prose work, Bachelors Get Lonely, by the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, one of the founding members of the New Narrative movement. The two together depict the author's early years struggling to become a writer in the sexed-up, boozy, drug-ridden world of Long Island's North Shore in the 1970s. It concludes with Triangles in the Sand, a new, previously unpublished memoir of Killian's brief affair in the 1970s with the composer Arthur Russell. Fascination offers a moving and often funny view of the loneliness and desire that defined gay life of that era—a time in which Richard Nixon's resignation intersected with David Bowie's Diamond Dogs—from one of the leading voices in experimental gay writing of the past thirty years. “Move along the velvet rope,” Killian writes in Bedrooms Have Windows, “run your shaky fingers past the lacquered Keith Haring graffito: 'You did not live in our time! Be Sorry!'”

Memoirs

Fascination

Action Kylie

Arctic Summer

Drama. Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Art. California Interest. Being the selected plays of Kevin Killian, who has for decades won laurels for his novels, his poetry, and his work in the poets theater of the San Francisco bay area. Drawing from the late 1980s to the early 2010s, this is the first representative selection of Killian's plays. Once describing his productions as a form of "blanket permission," Killian added, "I think people might come away thinking, I could do that! Isn't that the best kind of work, something generative? Action painting was sort of like that..." This is a book to read, where reading means catching some action.

Stage Fright: Selected Plays from San Francisco Poets Theater

Lewis Ellingham

The first biography of poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965), a key figure in San Francisco’s gay cultural scene and in the development of American avant garde poetries.

Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance

Poet Be Like God

In his first collection of poetry, novelist Kevin Killian views the horrors of the AIDS pandemic through a narrow prism, the films of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento. Argento Series is structured like a horror film, populating deadpan reportage with badly drawn "characters" whose grisly deaths nevertheless come as an apocalyptic shock. For twenty years Killian's friends have been dying like flies--four flies on gray velvet, to borrow one of Argento's titles. And not only his friends, but millions of untold strangers, a catastrophe of such enormity that poetry itself gasps in its wake, deaf, blind, and speechless. Killian's poems are deceptively simple, quiet, and lyric, until the creaky melodrama of the giallo makes its entrance, screaming, like a virus--then the language shrieks and trembles. Argento Series is a testament to human suffering, a curse on the bureaucratic blindness that allows it to spread and grow, a call to political action unlike any other.

Argento Series

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.”

A Novel

Tony Greene Era

Poetry. LGBT Studies. The winner of the first Wonder Prize, Kevin Killian's TWEAKY VILLAGE is a book of poems from a dreamy Oz of delirium and nostalgia, memory and desire. Killian pays homage to the Iraq War dead, George Kuchar, old Hollywood, Kylie Minogue, friends, lovers and almost lovers: "Five years in / to a war that never ends, / I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies." Voices from the past—Tim Dlugos, David Bowie, Abraham Lincoln—fade in and out like overheard conversation, half- remembered a dozen years later.

Tweaky Village

Poetry. "Kylie Minogue, more than muse, is K. K.'s aesthetic m.o., his ammo. Around her name and image, he circulates the particles of his own uncanny idiom, which is unlike anything in contemporary American poetry. Killian works every instrument in the band; he sneaks up behind meaning, and makes it sing. Somehow, in the midst of defamiliarization, Killian's voice remains companionable and comforting. ACTION KYLIE is a book I will turn to when I want to remember that literature can regenerate authenticity as well as renege it. Killian plays with multiple rhetorics and codes, all in the pursuit of his own school of Action Poetry, in which I wish quickly to enroll"—Wayne Koestenbaum.

David Brazil

Poetry. Drama. Asian American Studies. African American Studies. Women's Studies. Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Studies. With new interest in poetry as a performative art, and with prewar experiments much in mind, the young poets of postwar America infused the stage with the rhythms and shocks of their poetry. From the multidisciplinary nexus of Black Mountain, to the Harvard-based Cambridge Poets Theater, to the West Coast Beats and San Francisco Renaissance, these energies manifested themselves all at once, and through the decades have continued to grow and mutate, innovating a form of writing that defies boundaries of genre. THE KENNING ANTHOLOGY OF POETS THEATER: 1945-1985 documents the emergence, growth, and varied fortunes of the form over decades of American literary history, with a focus on key regional movements. The largest and most comprehensive anthology of its kind yet assembled, the volume collects classics of poets theater as well as rarities long out of print and texts from unpublished manuscripts and archives. It will be an indispensable reference for students of postwar American poetry and avant-garde theater.

The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945-1985

Matthew Higgs

Lawrence Rinder

Catalog of an exhibition on view at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, May 11-Sept. 25, 2011.

Create

Ugo Rondinone

This catalogue documents the iteration of Ugo Rondinone?s vocabulary of solitude at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in the summer of 2017. In Berkeley, Rondinone complemented the installation of the forty-five clowns with some of his exuberant rainbow paintings, pairs of oversize clown shoes, and 1998, a dark, sixty-two-part cycle of ink-on-paper works evoking the pain of desire and attachment. The phrase?the world just makes me laugh? is from the poem?Welcoming the Flowers? (2004) by Rondinone?s husband, John Giorno. The tension that runs deep in Rondinone?s works, as much chromatically?between the darkness of 1998 and the rainbows airbrushed into colossal paintings?as psychologically?embodied in the pensive clowns?invites contemplation of the fact that laughter is never too far from crying. This is the fourth of a five-chapter publication series by Ugo Rondinone.00Exhibition: Berkeley Museum of Art, USA (26.06.-26.08.2017).

The World Just Makes Me Laugh

David Robbins

Essays by Matthew Higgs, Kevin Killian, and David Robbins. Foreword by Judith Richards and Ralph Rugoff.

Portraits of Artists by Other Artists

Likeness

Leslie Scalapino

Drama. A collaborative play in ten scenes, populated by a number of anonymous people and a few not so anonymous people such as Orpheus, Eurydice, Julia Roberts and Giorgio Agamben. "This play is our concerted attempt to demolish society"--Leslie Scalapino

(the Dreamed Title)

Stone Marmalade

On Long Island a group of Franciscan brothers stage a beauty contest for incoming freshmen - the judgment of Paris. In Steinbeck country an autograph dealer forges mementos of Audrey Hepburn while seducing a muscle-bound ex-con in orange undershorts. On Halloween the boys from Hitchcock's Rope throw their own party in the haunted house of Usher. To steal the love of his sister's scientist husband, a San Francisco weakling turns to steroids.

Kevin Killian

Books

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