ACKER

A lyric essay written through Kathy Acker's evocative prose, public statements, and private archives.

Douglas A. Martin presents a lyric cover of the career of Kathy Acker, a late-20th-century poet, writer, and punk. Over the course of Acker's groundbreaking, eyebrow-raising career, she furthered the causes of feminism and sex positivity while skirting censorship and achieving countercultural acclaim. The self-mythologizing Acker was as notorious for her complicated sexuality and back tattoos as she was for novels such as Blood and Guts in High School. Deftly tracing Acker's interactions with a diverse palette of avant-gardisms, world letters, cultures, and theory, the book is part biography and part intellectual study of the literary development of her work. Martin follows Acker through New York's downtown St. Mark's Poetry Project scene, Black Mountain College, and the Beats, as Acker embarks on her own deconstructions of subjects autobiographical and historical, art procedurals, proto-conceptual writing, and society's most systemic ideas.

Douglas A. Martin is the author of books of poetry and prose, including: Once You Go Back, Your Body Figured, In The Time of Assignments, Branwell, and They Change the Subject. His first novel, Outline of My Lover, was selected by Colm Tóibín as an International Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement and adapted in part by the Forsythe Company for their multimedia ballet/live film, Kammer/Kammer. His work has been translated into three languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.