Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is best known as a cultural and literary critic, as one of the primary forces behind the development of queer and gay/lesbian studies, and as author of several influential books: Tendencies, Epistemology of the Closet, and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. The publication of Fat Art, Thin Art, Sedgwick’s first volume of poetry, opens up another dimension of her continuing project of crossing and re-crossing the electrified boundaries between theory, lyric, and narrative. Embodying a decades-long adventure, the poems collected here offer the most accessible and definitive formulations to appear anywhere in Sedgwick’s writing on some characteristic subjects and some new ones: passionate attachments within and across genders; queer childhoods of many kinds; the performativity of a long, unconventional marriage; depressiveness, hilarity, and bliss; grave illness; despised and magnetic bodies and bodily parts. In two long fictional poems, a rich narrative momentum engages readers in the mysterious places—including Victorian novels—where characters, sexualities, and fates are unmade and made. Sedgwick’s poetry opens an unfamiliar, intimate, daring space that steadily refigures not only what a critic may be, but what a poem can do.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is best known as a cultural and literary critic, as one of the primary forces behind the development of queer and gay/lesbian studies, and as author of several influential books: Tendencies, Epistemology of the Closet, and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. The publication of Fat Art, Thin Art, Sedgwick’s first volume of poetry, opens up another dimension of her continuing project of crossing and re-crossing the electrified boundaries between theory, lyric, and narrative. Embodying a decades-long adventure, the poems collected here offer the most accessible and definitive formulations to appear anywhere in Sedgwick’s writing on some characteristic subjects and some new ones: passionate attachments within and across genders; queer childhoods of many kinds; the performativity of a long, unconventional marriage; depressiveness, hilarity, and bliss; grave illness; despised and magnetic bodies and bodily parts. In two long fictional poems, a rich narrative momentum engages readers in the mysterious places—including Victorian novels—where characters, sexualities, and fates are unmade and made. Sedgwick’s poetry opens an unfamiliar, intimate, daring space that steadily refigures not only what a critic may be, but what a poem can do.
“Oddly beautiful and impossible to look away from” (Los Angeles Times), the stories in The Fat Artist are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair. In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd, the voices in Benjamin Hale’s The Fat Artist and Other Stories speak from the margins: a dominatrix whose longtime client, a US congressman, drops dead during a tryst in a hotel room; an addict in precarious recovery who lands a job driving a truck full of live squid; a heartbroken performance artist who attempts to eat himself to death as a work of art. From underground radicals hiding in Morocco to an aging hippy in Colorado in the summer before 9/11 to a young drag queen in New York at the cusp of the AIDS crisis, these stories rove freely across time and place, carried by haunting, peculiar narratives that form the vast tapestry of American life. “A steadily growing…talent” (Kirkus Reviews), Hale’s prize-winning fiction abounds with a love of language and a wild joy for storytelling, earning accolades from writers such as novelist Jonathan Ames, who compared discovering his work to watching Mickey Mantle play ball for the first time; Washington Post critic Ron Charles, who declared him “fully evolved as a writer,” and bestselling author Jodi Picoult, who simply called him “brilliant.” Pairing absurdity with philosophical musings on the unnerving intersections between life and death, art and ridicule, consumption and creation, “the audacious imagination evident in Hale’s acclaimed debut, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, shines again in this…provocative collection that takes a unique view of the human condition” (Booklist).
At the time of her death in after a long battle with cancer, Eve Sedgwick had been working on a book on affect and Proust, and on the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. This volume, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, brings together a collection of her last work.
In this book, Michel Lauricella presents both his artistic and systematic methods for drawing the human body—with drawing techniques from the écorché (showing the musculature underneath the skin) to sketches of models in action. In more than 1000 illustrations, the human body is shown from a new perspective—from bone structure to musculature, from anatomical detail to the body in motion. Morpho is a rich, fascinating, and helpful book that can go with you everywhere on your sketching journey. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 16.0px Times; color: #212121} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 16.0px Times; color: #212121; min-height: 19.0px} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Cambria; color: #212121} span.s1 {color: #232323} In this book, artist and teacher Michel Lauricella presents both his artistic and systematic methods for drawing the human body with drawing techniques from the écorché (showing the musculature and bone structure beneath the skin) to dynamic sketches of models in action. In more than 1000 illustrations, the human body is shown from a new perspective—from bone structure to musculature, from anatomical detail to the body in motion. Lauricella believes that only by learning basic human anatomy can one’s drawing skills be perfected. Morpho is a rich, fascinating, and essential book that can go with you everywhere on your sketching journey.
Tendencies brings together for the first time the essays that have made Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick "the soft-spoken queen of gay studies" (Rolling Stone). Combining poetry, wit, polemic, and dazzling scholarship with memorial and autobiography, these essays have set new standards of passion and truthfulness for current theoretical writing. The essays range from Diderot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James to queer kids and twelve-step programs; from "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" to a performance piece on Divine written with Michael Moon; from political correctness and the poetics of spanking to the experience of breast cancer in a world ravaged and reshaped by AIDS. What unites Tendencies is a vision of a new queer politics and thought that, however demanding and dangerous, can also be intent, inclusive, writerly, physical, and sometimes giddily fun.
When she begins therapy for depression after breast cancer treatment, the author brings with her an extraordinarily open and critical mind, but also shyness about revealing herself. Resisting easy responses to issues of dependence, desire, and mortality, she warily commits to a male therapist who shares little of her cultural and intellectual world. Although not without pain, their improvised relationship is as unexpectedly pleasurable as her writing is unconventional: Sedgwick combines dialogue, verse, and even her therapist's notes to explore her interior life--and delivers and delicate and tender account of how we arrive at love.
A masterful synthesis of literary readings and poetic reflections, making profound contributions to our understanding of chronic pain At the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, acclaimed theorist Michael D. Snediker locates something unexpected: chronic pain. Starting from this paradigm-shifting insight, Snediker elaborates a bracing examination of the phenomenological peculiarity of disability, articulating a complex idiom of figuration as the lived substance of pain’s quotidian. This lexicon helps us differently inhabit both the theoretical and phenomenal dimensions of chronic pain and suffering by illuminating where these modes are least distinguishable. Suffused with fastidious close readings, and girded by a remarkably complex understanding of phenomenal experience, Contingent Figure resides in the overlap between literary theory and lyric experiment. Snediker grounds his exploration of disability and chronic pain in dazzling close readings of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and many others. Its juxtaposition of these readings with candid autobiographical accounts makes Contingent Figure an exemplary instance of literary theory as a practice of lyric attention. Thoroughly rigorous and anything but predictable, this stirring inquiry leaves the reader with a rich critical vocabulary indebted to the likes of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, D. O. Winnicott, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A master class in close reading’s inseparability from the urgency of lived experience, this book is essential for students and scholars of disability studies, queer theory, formalism, aesthetics, and the radical challenge of Emersonian poetics across the long American nineteenth century.
Bathroom Songs: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet is the first book of essays to consider the poetry of one of the twentieth- and early twenty-first-century's most important literary, affect, and queer theorists. Acclaimed as one of the "truly innovative" poets of her generation, by Maud Ellmann, Sedgwick's work as a poet is, perhaps, less well known, but is no less compelling than her ground-breaking trilogy of queer theoretical texts: Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Epistemology of the Closet, and Tendencies. The book includes seven, specially commissioned essays considering Sedgwick's published poetry and writing about poets, by Angus Brown, Meg Boulton, Mary Baine Campbell, Jason Edwards, Kathryn R. Kent, Monica Pearl, and Benjamin Westwood, that range across the complete range of Sedgwick's work, from her earliest published lyrics through her first collection of poetry, Fat Art, Thin Art, to her part-haiku, part-prose autobiography, A Dialogue on Love, and beyond. In addition, the book contains over forty of Sedgwick's previously uncollected poems, ranging from her earliest poem on T.E. Lawrence to her final poem 'Death', introduced and contextualized in a second essay by Edwards. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Part I. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet Jason Edwards - Introduction: Bathroom Songs? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Poet Angus Connell Brown - Look with Your Hands Ben Westwood - The Abject Animal Poetics of 'The Warm Decembers' Kathryn R. Kent - Eve's Muse Mary Baine Campbell - 'Shyly / as a big sister I would yearn / to trace its avocations', or, Who's the Muse? Monica Pearl - Queer Therapy: On the Couch with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Meg Boulton - Waiting in the Dark: Some Musings on Sedgwick's Performative(s) Part II. The Uncollected Poems Jason Edwards - Introduction: Someday We'll Look Back with Pleasure Even on is: Sedgwick's Uncollected Poems Poems Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit - Death - Bathroom Song - Pandas in Trees - Untitled (Blake panda poems) - Tru-Cut - Valentine - 2/81 - Lost Letter - The Palimpsest - Explicit - Hank Williams and a Cat - Jimmy Lane - Jukebox - Die Sommernacht hat mir's angetan - Phantom Limb - Two P.O.W. Suicides - Once There Was a Way to Get Back Homeward - The Ring of Fire - The Prince of Love in the Desert Night - Artery - A Death by Water - Yellow Toes - Soutine - Another Poem from the Creaking Bed - Cain - The City and Man - Lullaby - No More Dusk - Ribs of Steel - To a Friend - When in Minute Script - To a Swimmer - Untitled ('Wonder no more upon the mysteries') - From an Ending for ' e Triumph of Life' - T.E. Lawrence and the Old Man, His Imagined Tormentor - Movie Party, Telluride House, Ithaca, New York - Falling in Love over The Seven Pillars - Calling Overseas - What the Poet ought And What She Found in the Telluride Files: - Epilogue: Teachers and Lovers - The Last Poem of Yv*r W*nt*rs - Saul at Jeshimon [First Variant] - Saul at Jeshimon [Second Variant] - Siegfried Rex von Munthe, Soldier and Poet, Killed December, 1939, on the German Battleship Graf Spee - Lawrence Reads La Morte D'Arthur in the Desert
