Frozen Tears III

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.”

Introduction by Wayne Koestenbaum

Afterword by Dodie Bellamy

In the fall of 2017, Obe Alkema got acquainted with the American poet Kevin Killian, first at the New Narrative conference at UC Berkeley, then at the Poets & Critics Symposium in Paris that was all about his poetry. A year and a half later, Alkema traveled back to Paris, this time as a participant of a writing residency. He was there to research the landscape of memory, but more than he expected and initially realized, Kevin’s death the previous month (June 2019) affected his return. Besides inevitable, mourning and remembering became obsessions for Alkema, as he shows in ‘My Kevin, Our Paris’, a memoir about Kevin Killian (1952–2019), but especially about his Kevin and their Paris.

Published as a precursor to BFTK#6, ‘In the Bag’ by Paul Buck is a pamphlet / essay / missive about rarities, the out of print, one-offs and those ‘oddities, oddments and ornaments’ that collectors and magpies seek, hoard and lose. Printed and numbered in an edition of 150, each copy comes with a violet insert featuring a photograph of a Gladstone bag by Valentine Day.

Edited and introduced by Michael Cross, this book features an interview Cross conducted with Leslie Scalapino from 2007-2010, as well as Scalapino’s “Poetics” essay, both published here for the first time. 62 pages, side stapled. Cover art by Amy Evans McClure. Covers RISO printed by Aaron Cohick.

From Michael Cross’s introduction to this volume:

"I first worked up the courage to propose a long-form interview to Leslie Scalapino in September of 2006. By then, I had spent most of my early writing life obsessed with her project. Her work was the first to genuinely illustrate for me what poetry is and what it can ultimately do, and ever since that first glance into that they were at the beach—which I discovered by chance as an undergraduate—I spent much of my free time attempting to apprentice myself to her. As a graduate student at Mills College in the early aughts, I spent hours obsessively scanning the shelves of an all-but-forgotten warehouse in San Leandro called Gray Wolf Books, which I’d discovered was a treasure-trove of Bay Area Language writing, including shelves of abandoned and out-of-print O Books. I sent a letter to the publisher’s address on the back of those books, and incredibly, Scalapino herself answered with the generosity that defined her among younger poets."

Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.

Conceptual writing is emerging as a vital 21st century literary movement and I’ll Drown My Book represents the contributions of women in this defining moment. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, I’ll Drown My Book takes its name from a poem by Bernadette Mayer, appropriating Shakespeare. The book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work. I’ll Drown My Book offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Kathy Acker, Oana Avasilichioaei & Erin Moure, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Angela Carr, Monica de la Torre, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Jen Hofer, Bernadette Mayer, Sharon Mesmer, Laura Mullen, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards, Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuña, Wendy Walker, Jen Bervin, Inger Christiansen, Marcella Durand, Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Jennifer Karmin, Mette Moestrup, Yedda Morrison, Anne Portugal, Joan Retallack, Cia Rinne, Giovanni Singleton, Anne Tardos, Hannah Weiner, Christine Wertheim, Norma Cole, Debra Di Blasi, Stacy Doris & Lisa Robertson, Sarah Dowling, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Laura Moriarty, Redell Olsen, Chus Pato, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet, a.rawlings, Ryoko Seikiguchi, Susan M. Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop, Renee Angle, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tina Darragh, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Maryrose Larkin, Tracie Morris, Sawako Nakayasu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, kathryn l. pringle, Frances Richard, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rachel Zolf.

Four zines, documenting and continuing a series of four exhibitions that took place last summer, also known as the summer of 2021 at Klosterruine Berlin. Digging up what’s always already left behind, this series reframes the exhibition as an excavation site and engages archeology as a speculative and aesthetic procedure. A map, a notebook, a calendar and a dream diary, these four zines allow you to become your own archeologist.

Catalog is a serial publication about cataloging, written by Lieven Lahaye and designed by Ott Metusala. This is Catalog issue 17, ‘Introduction’, it’s part of a sub-series, researching the life, work and near invisibility of writer Duncan Smith (1954–1991).