Wayne Koestenbaum, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes: A Novel
, Soft Skull, 2004."Five years of breakdown separate pianist Theo Mangrove's last recital in Europe from his planned comeback in Aigues-Mortes, "the town of dead water." At home in tiny East Kills, NY, Theo begins jotting in 25 notebooks, purchased all at once and addressed to his mother. Theo's wife, aside from servicing two of Theo's twenty daily erections, will have nothing to do with him. The other eighteen—taken care of by male hustlers, random strangers in YMCA locker-rooms and naked piano students—contribute to Theo's sense of dissolution as his "comeback" approaches. Overcome with the belief that Moira Orfei, queen of the Italian circus during the 1960's, must perform with him, Theo begins to write to her and to pen what may or may not be her cryptic replies into his notebooks. In a fugue of notes and troubling memories, Theo prepares for Aigues-Mortes, struggling with Moira's guidance towards one final, full celebration of "the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite."
Peopled by piano playing relatives, prostitutes, muses and manipulators; poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum's first novel shines a hot light on the treacherous crossroads of sex, death, family and popular culture."
"Pianist Theo Mangrove's planned comeback is imminent, but he's losing his nerve. While restlessly counting down the days until a performance in the French town of Aigues-Mortes, he becomes strangely convinced that Moira Orfei, a 1960s Italian circus queen, must perform with him. As he begins to turn his displaced creativity and relentless sexual energy on a series of male hustlers, random strangers, and music students, Theo wonders whether he will be able to channel his passions into one final celebration of "the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite." Peopled by pianists, prostitutes, muses, and manipulators, this debut novel by noted poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum hums with obsessive energy and examines one artist's choices at the crossroads of sex, death, and creativity."
"Written in the style of a surreal fever dream, Wayne Koestenbaum's first novel records in brilliant poetic vernacular the swan song of Theo Mangrove, a dissipated concert pianist and debauched sexual adventurer obsessed with the Italian circus star Moira Orfei... The story of Koestenbaum's all-too-human freaks of nature is delivered in willfully, at times hilariously debauched deadpan and makes for irresistibly twisted magic. How could a reader not delight in the fiercely rendered hallucination of it all?" — Bookforum
"Wayne Koestenbaum, a writer of mature and accountable linguistic genius, has, in Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, taken up the fabulist form and mastered it absolutely, giving us in the narrator's fire-eating, dotted-rhythm negotiation with the mesmerizing eponymous heroine - a post-modern re-incarnation of Lola Montes - the fever chart of a hallucination that in the agility, strength and beauty of its daredevil walk of the signifier across the tightrope of the significant is in every way a match for its most illustrious precedent, the hallucination recorded in Nabokov's Pale Fire." — James McCourt
"Wayne Koestenbaum's dazzling new novel chronicles a dying polysexual pianist's obsession with Moira Orfei, a stunningly beautiful circus artiste who may not exist. If Debussy and Robert Walser had collaborated on an opera, it would sound like this." — John Ashbery
"Brilliantly imagined, bitterly funny, and emotionally overwhelming, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes is a mordant, exquisite ode to 'the authentic and paralyzing distance between us.' Insignificance is transformed into magnificence, inspiration is disfiguring, and desire is desecration: rapture becomes indistinguishable from rapture. A deep aesthetic and intellectual pleasure." — David Shields
"From poet and cultural critic Koestenbaum, a first novel made up of the lunatic rantings of ailing concert pianist Theo Mangrove. It's quite a load for any man to bear. The doomed narrator is saddled with the prospect of tragic artistic failure, an Oedipal fixation on his mother, Alma (whose international fame as a pianist eclipses his own), a passing sexual interest in his sister Tanaquil (whose dream is "to be a madam in an important bordello"), and a polysexual perversity that requires him to relieve 20 erections daily, a feat he's aided in by street hustlers, students and teachers (of all ages and both sexes) and also, astonishingly, by his wife ("Unsurprisingly," he tells us, "I present HIV symptoms," yet, surprisingly, both he and his generous supply of partners have a consistently cavalier disregard for protection.) Naturally, there's a great deal of description of sexual entrances and exits of all sorts, much of it coated in an oddly nonsensical lyricism ("After an intense orgasm we produce voice from our head rather than our chest"). Koestenbaum is best known for his booklength rhapsodies on iconic women (Jackie Onassis, Maria Callas, etc.) and the gay men who love them. Thus, Theo, too, has an obsession with an icon: the Italian circus artist Moira Orfei, with whom he is determined to collaborate on a "comeback" recital to be given in the small French town of Aigues-Mortes. The novel, written in the form of "notebooks" addressed to Theo's mother, includes letters to Moira and what may or may not be her own replies, written in the same inscrutable diction as a semiotics student after a three-dayecstasy binge: "My needs and destiny exceed yours. I command more land, more syntax." Koestenbaum may be reaching to combine the mad genius of Pale Fire with the florid outlaw sexuality of Jean Genet, but his narrator has neither the wit of the former nor the nuance of the latter." - Kirkus Reviews
"Wayne Koestenbaum’s Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes is written in twenty-five notebooks – a first person diary of sorts – and for the first time in a long time I felt I befriended a book. Usually there is some sort of emotional connection (either positive or negative), but there are some books that I am sad to see finished. Like waving goodbye at a train station, there is a brief moment where you wish you could hold that moment for just a little while longer, wishing for just one more chapter, paragraph, something that doesn’t mean goodbye forever. Again, here I am being my melodramatic self; I know I could read Koestenbaum’s other books or even reread this one – but I can never recreate the first time I came across Theo Mangrove.
Koestenbaum has created an illuminating character in these notebooks. Theo Mangrove is a pianist struggling to plan a glorious comeback career. He spends most of his time with male hustlers, writing in his notebooks, writing to Moira Orfei – a famous Italian circus star – (whether this correspondence is real or imagined doesn’t matter – either way it is stunningly poignant), arguing with his sister and his wife, having secret rendezvous with aunt, and discussing anything and everything with his mother, Alma, who is also a famed pianist spending most of her time touring South America. Theo is also dying of AIDS. His illness and his folie de grandeur make his narration unreliable. But as with any unreliable narrator – although I am not sure if narrator is the right word since nothing really happens; the notebooks are a photograph of time passing – what is said, or isn’t said, or any untruths can be just as revealing:
'Moira Orfei is my ideal woman if I imagine myself ten years ago watching someone in Les Baux watching us walk hand-in-hand to a bistro with a corner banquette which we regularly claim; seated there under this person’s jealous surveillance, we order our usual negronis. (Alma once told me that negronis were the cocktail-of-choice for the Abstract Expressionists. Moira Orfei’s beauty embodies the Abstract Expressionist mandate to combat entropy.)…Moira Orfei is my ideal woman if I imagine someone watching me help her pick a belt and apply jasmine eau de toilette behind the neck at a department store counter in Paris. I needn’t merely imagine this scene: it happened, the last time Moira and I were in Printemps together.'
Koestenbaum creates an unforgettable voice in Theo. The writing is steeped in emotional intellectualism and the balance between the two is constantly shifting:
'Gertrude Guadalquivar’s [Theo's recently deceased grandmother] ghost has entered my studio; she hangs, a trapeze artist, from the chandelier. I am an amateur spiritualist. Why did I not repair Alma’s amorality and push her in an ethical direction? Now Gertrude’s spirit crouches atop the plaster bust of Brahms and enters my spinal cord. Her doctrinal ghost is warm, like a down sleeping bag, and wet, like a deep sea fishing trip, or an essay.'
Although I cannot directly relate to being a bisexual man with a terminal illness, the self-analysis that Theo maintains throughout the notebooks is so familiar that I shudder to think what lies in the depths of some of my own old notebooks. The novel is rich, frightening, bizarre, and most certainly human." - Two Umbrellas
Read it at Google Books
Wayne Koestenbaum, Hotel Theory
, Soft Skull Press, 2007."Hotel Theory is actually two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of a hotels, and a dime-novel (Hotel Women), featuring Lana Turner and Liberace. (In the novel, the articles �a,� �an,� and �the� never appear.) The two books, fiction and nonfiction, run concurrently, in twin columns.
The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author's dreams, in literature, in film, and in history. Guest-stars in the nonfiction portion of the book are Oscar Wilde, Walter Benjamin, Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, Colette, Gertrude Stein, Martin Heidegger, Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, Siegfried Kracauer, Paul Auster, and many, many others. Hotel Theory gives voice - in divided fashion - to an aesthetic of indifference, of stupor, of hyperaesthesia, of yearning. The lassitude of the hotel-dweller (and, of the postmodern subject), in Hotel Theory, finds expression and a momentary soapbox. The book is an oblique manifesto for a philosophy of being-here, being-anywhere. Hotel Theory is also a book about the disappearance of writing, in particular, of Walter Benjamin's suicide in a hotel room in Portbou, Spain. Hotel Theory is the place where writing disappears; it is also the locale where a new mode of theorizing (in fiction, in fragment, through quotation and palimpsest) makes itself felt."
Excerpt
Wayne Koestenbaum, Humiliation (Big Ideas//Small Books)
Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration
Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
"Koestenbaum, who is gay and teaches English at Yale, calls himself an "opera queen" because he is addicted to opera, fetishizes records, tries to befriend divas and keeps lists of his opera "highs." A literate amalgam of speculation, gossip, reminiscences and historical lore, his confessions are one fan's passionate love letter to the opera, illustrated with photographs and memorabilia. But Koestenbaum ( Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems ) strains to find reasons for the reputed affinity of gay men for opera. He views singing as analogous to gays' coming out of the closet and relates the diva's body movements, vocal attack and public persona to "a style that gay people, particularly queens, have found essential . . . a camp style of resistance and protection." He presents 12 psychosocial explanations for the "gay cult" of Maria Callas. One chapter, "A Pocket Guide to Queer Moments in Opera," analyzes 28 opera highlights from a gay perspective." - Publishers Weekly
"A brilliant book - an ecstatic book - inevitably, an elegiac book. And one which - like some operas, certain voices - has the capacity to provoke - in this reader and opera-lover, anyway - admiration, rapture, identification." — Susan Sontag
"A high-spirited and very personal book... laced with moral reflections and warmed with comedy... A work of formidable and curious learning...A dazzling performance." — New York Times Book Review
Wayne Koestenbaum, Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon
"Jackie Under My Skin is a passionate investigation of the ways Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis transformed America's definition of celebrity, identity, and style. In a gallery of fantasies and tableaux, Wayne Koestenbaum explains the late first lady’s hold on Americans by examining the myths and metaphors that we've attached to her. An exuberant paean to a great star, Jackie Under My Skin is also a meditation on fame, mortality, and the difficulty of defining desire."
"The same kind of serious play that distinguished Koestenbaum's earlier book, The Queen's Throat, a highly regarded study of opera and homosexuality, shapes the Yale English professor's scrutiny of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis-and, more exactly, of the highly charged gap between the private woman and the public icon she became. In brief chapters, her signature sunglasses and scarf, her coiffure (``battle gear of a woman of means''), even the ``O'' of her name occasion manic, inventive and sometimes wildly funny ruminations. In ``Silent Jackie,'' Maria Callas is quoted as saying that Onassis ``spoke like Marilyn Monroe playing Ophelia''; in ``Jackie as Housewife,'' Onassis is at once the devoted helpmate of powerful men and the star whose allure obscured them; ``Exotic Jackie,'' always conscious of her public role, was ``in exile from herself, a bemused visitor to her own body.'' Though some will undoubtedly find the book hopelessly irreverent, those fascinated by the cult of celebrity will find Koestenbaum's analysis of an enduring American icon a compelling contribution in cultural studies." - Publishers Weekly
"The same kind of serious play that distinguished Koestenbaum's earlier book, The Queen's Throat, a highly regarded study of opera and homosexuality, shapes the Yale English professor's scrutiny of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis?and, more exactly, of the highly charged gap between the private woman and the public icon she became. In brief chapters, her signature sunglasses and scarf, her coiffure ("battle gear of a woman of means"), even the "O" of her name occasion manic, inventive and sometimes wildly funny ruminations. In "Silent Jackie," Maria Callas is quoted as saying that Onassis "spoke like Marilyn Monroe playing Ophelia"; in "Jackie as Housewife," Onassis is at once the devoted helpmate of powerful men and the star whose allure obscured them; "Exotic Jackie," always conscious of her public role, was "in exile from herself, a bemused visitor to her own body." Though some will undoubtedly find the book hopelessly irreverent, those fascinated by the cult of celebrity will find Koestenbaum's analysis of an enduring American icon a compelling contribution in cultural studies."
Wayne Koestenbaum, Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics
"According to Koestenbaum, culture is all around us: in movie magazines, paparazzi, Robert Mapplethorpe's photos, Princess Di's dresses and, of course, Liz Taylor. After deconstructing gay men and opera (The Queen's Throat) and prominent first ladies (Jackie Under My Skin), the ever-observant Koestenbaum has assembled in these 49 reprinted essays an idiosyncratic overview of the state of U.S. popular culture as well as his own mind. His charm and power as a writer reside in his ability to wed his own obsessions with the most serious and the most frivolous of cultural manifestations. For him, a meditation on Oscar Wilde's trial prompts the statement, "I... believe that desire is extreme and anti-social." An essay on Elizabeth Taylor moves easily from her looks to his own gender identity: "After watching Elizabeth Taylor movies I feel eerily masculine. Her beauty shoves me out of maleness and compresses me back into it." In a less astute or self-aware writer, such leaps might read as simple narcissism or miscalculated post-modern posturing, but Koestenbaum is able to combine personal writing and cultural analysis in a way that advances both with poise and intelligence. While some of the pieces are less substantial--such as his quirky short essays on envy and masochism--Koestenbaum delivers when he writes most personally. "The Aryan Boy," an introspective essay on masculinity, homosexuality and Jewish identity, shows the author at his best: moving, insightful and fueled by his ability to shock, provoke and challenge." - Publishers Weekly
"Sex and aesthetics are all well and good, but its stars who claim pride of place in this miscellany by academic gadfly Koestenbaum. Though its divided into six parts on topics ranging from Dress and Undress to Reading, this collection of occasional pieces, whose original provenance ranges from Parnassus to Allure, breaks down into two larger units: unabashed celebrations of popular culture and cultish figures like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and more gnomic, cryptic analyses, or replications, of the tensions of contemporary culture. In these latter piecesespecially in the 12 prose poems of The Locomotive EmpressKoestenbaum is often opaque, banal, or portentously playful, but he is never staid. His unapologetic delectation in himself, the dreams he constantly retails, and his reactions to cultural marginalia (I consider sexual liberation to be a subset of fashion liberation, he remarks at one point, and later confesses: I am afraid of my underwear) gives his profiles of stars from Liz Taylor to Dawn Upshaw a canny infatuation compounded equally of postmodern irony and Rex Reed. He revealingly tells Alec Baldwin: I feel a burning need to meet stars, and its easy to see why: His worship of icons from Melanie Griffith to Gertrude Stein, like his graphic fantasy of himself as Bill Clintons lover, validates the star-struck persona he delights in discovering in the most unlikely contexts (I am a woman of Dada... I am exhibiting a hectic, touristy relation to my own passions). Koestenbaum even manages to find himself in the mandarin Stein, whose austere demands on readers couldnt differ more from his own eagerness to please himself and everybody else. Logorrhea is the hallmark of contemporary discourse, rules Koestenbaum. Readers who arent frightened by that prospect will enjoy passing the odd hour with this latest collection from the Donald Barthelme of the nonfiction aisle." - Kirkus Reviews
Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol
"With at least two full-scale biographies in addition to his own voluminous writings in print, it might seem that there is little new to say about the life and career of mass market voyeur Warhol. Koestenbaum, a poet and author of fabulously rococo books on opera (The Queen's Throat) and Jackie Onassis (Jackie Under My Skin), seems acutely aware of this, and gives us a Warhol who is anything but the removed observer of most popular accounts, finding Warhol's own eros and mourning spilling everywhere into his art. The result is an intensely personalized psychologizing of the work; the more philosophically inclined will be horrified, while those looking for a way under "Andy's" implacable surfaces will be fascinated. The famous Brillo boxes become "boxes without openings [that] seem simulacra of Andy's body a queer body that may want to be entered or to enter, but that offers too many feints, too many surfaces, too much braggadocio, and no real opening." Koestenbaum is most trenchant in the sections devoted to Warhol's little-seen films, bringing their shattering experiments in sexual cinema vividly to life, freely and directly relating his own reactions to them … la Pauline Kael at her best. Warhol's achievement in film, while clear to cognoscenti, certainly gets its best popular treatment here. Throughout, Koestenbaum's engagements with Warhol's life and art, tinged with poetic brilliance and surgical dispassion ("these accessories gave [Warhol] an alien aura, as if his vital fluids and gases had been evacuated"), feel very high-stakes indeed, making this book an engrossing battle of wills. (Sept.)Forecast: Koestenbaum, an engaging speaker and notoriously marvelous dresser, should attract fans to his five-city author tour. This book may be a little too queer for the average fan of the Warhol silk screens, but its audacious bodily insistence should win it plenty of reviews and admirers. Theory-heads should check out Andy Warhol, a collection of essays edited by New York University cinema studies professor Annette Michaelson, and including work by the likes of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss." - Publishers Weekly
Wayne Koestenbaum, Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems
"In the title poem and centerpiece of this debut collection, 1989 "Discovery"/ Nation poetry award co-winner Koestenbaum writes, "Mired in low culture, / I was aching to reach the high." But it is precisely the low that allows him to exult in the lavish heights of the Metropolitan Opera, idolizing a diva who rises above the mundane only in her performances. Koestenbaum's own performances are formal and fluidly elegant: "I think that Anna / Moffo sings, / to this day, in a second, / parallel Met, a hologram of the original / projected in air, / where failing voices continue / to thrive amidst a system of strange geysers / and girders, cables / linking the golden prompter's box / to a sky that burns directly on the stage." His wit can become self-conscious, his metaphors heavy, but the unifying strength of the poems is Koestenbaum's burgeoning awareness of being gay, with all its emotional ramifications: "Thinking I was invisible, I wore the peacock / Blue and found I was too visible. I wanted to shock / My public into cheers, until I learned that they were primitives... / When Carla put her hand on Ricky's knee / I saw my future's blueprint. I was wearing pants of lapis lazuli." - Publishers Weekly
"Half operatic libretto, half slangy conversation, Koestenbaum's first book of poems interweaves sophisticated urban wit with a sense of lost happiness ("I am a landlord of a sadness"). With Anna Moffo, well-known coloratura soprano (born in 1932 in Wayne, Pennsylvania) as muse and "favorite," Koestenbaum explores role-playing, sexual identity, friendship, homoeroticism, and art as a refuge from psychic discontinuity. Through his rapid-fire digressions and formally rhyming arpeggios emerges a longing for elusive interpersonal realities "in which the secret life is fully seen." "I read/ these urgent things too quickly, as if I were not fixed/ By what occurs, as cats, cards, and elections/ Are fixed." Koestenbaum's extravagant fantasies nurse "a foolish daydream" of opera as a metaphor of life. "I mail/ this letter,/ addressed to Miss Moffo, care/ of the mind's Met, where Broadway joins forgotten avenues." - Frank Allen
Wayne Koestenbaum, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offen
"Koestenbaum's second volume of poetry reads like a catalogue of immediacy, of mystical and erotic ecstasy so emotionally charged that one cannot quite call it confessional--the energy gathered into these poems creates a voice of its own. The book is comprised of a series of poems caught between two long vertiginous works, both aptly entitled "Rhapsody." The first recollects, with lyrical precision, his childhood, his first lies ("My mother is pregnant") and his first apprehension of "atoms exploding in fission" incarnated in a terminally ill young boy named "Baldie" who, with "molten collision," refuses to be tormented by a school bully. When Koestenbaum recalls his piano lessons, he seemingly slips in his own ars poetica: "I can't / depend on pressure for crescendo, but / must dement the rhythm so it / stumbles, hesitates expressively, the line / opening its heart in quick crotchets." (The utterances that make up the last poem do exactly this.) He seeks to "ambush" his self-conscious side, which has kept him from "the inspiration to speak without error or apology!" So, speak he does - improvising, questioning and probing with a directness that doesn't so much draw you in as recklessly push you along. If less ambitious readers find they need a break from these brilliantly exhausting works, they can turn to the poetry that falls between the pillars of his two "Rhapsody" poems, and find Koestenbaum focusing on his homosexual awakening and his relationship to classical music. This magnetic collection, once started, is difficult to put down. And once finished, readers may find themselves turning to page one and starting all over again." - Publishers Weekly
"If beauty and truth are the hallmarks of quality verse, then Koestenbaum has climbed the pinnacle and raised his arms in triumph with this work. His poems center on the power of the word, to which he surrenders; he is thereby liberated to "say something clearly and pack [his] voice away." The reader is taken on a journey through music, mortality, sexual revelation, and a young man's affinity for the leading ladies of the silver screen. However, the masterpiece of the volume, a book in itself, is the poem "Rhapsody," in which Koestenbaum uses his love for music (an extension of the word) to take the reader on a nine-part expedition that is intimate, yet not confessional; improvisational, yet not reckless; fantastic, yet not garish. This may well be the best long poem since John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Koestenbaum succeeds because he possesses the poet's true courage: he has composed "a poem [that] should be the letter you dare not write or send." Highly recommended." - Tim Gavin
Wayne Koestenbaum, The Milk of Inquiry
"I don't want to know what I'm forging, I want to glide/ past obligations ampler than I've guessed..." Slack, odd and ravishing, Koestenbaum's poems take spectacular risksAconstantly self-lacerating, curtly erotic and courting of clich?: "father has big tanned tennisplaying nose/ I'd like him to be my shrink/ maybe strip him...." A pervasive flatness of tone matches the poet's laconic, self-proclaimed lack of sensation, one that is uncannily effective in conveying a desperate ennui, yet coyly manages to place itself within a particular pantheon: "Hollywood single bed in a letter by O'Hara/ decrescendo in a sonata by Beethoven/ blankness in a life by me." The 28 lyrics of the book's first section are perhaps Koestenbaum's best, complexly disclosing his relationships to family, lovers, books, music, life: "I miss how slow the world used to be,/ before I ruined it, this morning, with my crazy deliberations./ I miss the poisoned, old momentum of last night." Relentlessly name-droppyA"I like dropping their names/ it's as if I'm dropping their whole oeuvres"Athe long poem "Four Lemon Drops" recalls the title poem of Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender in its unflinching, poetically reflexive self-examinations, coming this time in jagged, accretive quatrains. Wildly (Wilde-ly?) ambitious if less successful is a section of 115 sonnets, "Metamorphoses (Masked Ball)," where Medusa, for example, can speak as Mae West, Ronald Firbank or Walt Disney, and Echo as Rosa Luxemburg, George Platt Lynes or John AshberyAand many others. A poet, cultural critic and curator, Koestenbaum, in his third book of poems, presents scarily seductive surfaces, only partially concealing a concern with the very deepest questions." - Publishers Weekly
"From poet, academic, cultural journalist, and all-around gadfly Koestenbaum comes this third collection, a book both sublime and contravening, musical and mildly repulsive. It's dominated by the 115-sonnet "Metamorphoses (Masked Ball),'' which has all of the poets mythic heroes and heroinesWallace Stevens, Elizabeth Taylor, Patty Hearst, and many othersspeaking as Echo, Medusa, Proserpina, and other figures of Greek myth. While the series is brave and relentless in its ribaldry (Robin Hood as Echo says, "I think my penis was larger than his; Stevens as Echo says, "I acquired new pine teeth. / My forte was a custardy willingness to chat''), Koestenbaums autobiographical libidinal musings are far more remarkable. His poems have the appeal of frank gossip about strangers ("how difficult it must be to masturbate in a house occupied by smart mother and father'') and social self-mockery ("I wish off the bat I could list three hundred people who know me / or just three hundred people periodDavid Cassidy. Shirley Jones Bille''). The best lines have the logic of dreams ("I left my mother's body / to enter a duplex'') and ("I miss how slow the world used to be, / before I ruined it, this morning, / with my crazy deliberations''). Strange, milky delicacies indeed." - Kirkus Reviews
Wayne Koestenbaum, Model Homes (American Poets Continuum)
"Wayne Koestenbaum knows how to drop the language in the blender of the imagination and hit frappe! The 13 ottava rima cantos in Model Homes present a neo-Freudian tale of the goings-on in the poet’s present home and various events from his childhood. Modulating a voice that is urbane and ribald, melancholic and wry, Koestenbaum puts a memorable spin on the status quo notion of domestic arrangements."
"In the "Warm-Up" to this Don Juan-inspired paean to domestic life, Koestenbaum laconically substitutes "I lack a subject" for Byron's "I want a hero." Stanza, in Italian, means "room," and Koestenbaum throughout takes up abode in Byron's famous eight-line rhyming iambic pentameter. Through 13 cantos comprising varying numbers of stanzas, Koestenbaum runs through a California childhood, rubdowns by New York bodyworkers, piano practice, fear of inadequacy, meals mundane and elaborate, imaginings of origins ("I hear my own conception/ when Mother felt the gush from Dad's erection") and blissful union with partner Steve. That Koestenbaum's jokes are purposefully flat ("I've erred. Now, Steve is marinating a steak./ To help peel Yukon Golds, I'll take a break") is only part of the ways in which he separates himself from his 19th-century precursor. An even more constant presence here, though, is the poet's mother, a poet "who has a grief-prone heart,/ Who bore four children, gave up her art/ At least until I was in high school," and whose moods and modes the poet knowingly carries as further model homes, if involuntarily. At its best, this lovely, ambitious long poem most resembles A.R. Ammons's baggy, daily Tape for the Turn of the Year, but it's still Byronic enough to lodge itself "Between a Pagliaccio and a Puck/ Dying to give King Oberon a suck." - Publishers Weekly
Wayne Koestenbaum, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films: New Poems
"Poetry. Provocateur and interrogator of American cultural forms, Wayne Koestenbaum's latest collection, BEST-SELLING JEWISH PORN FILMS, showcases his characteristic urbane melancholia and ribald wit at its very best."
"These latest poems reach swoony, unforeseen heights of mental raucousness and worshipful style" — Dennis Cooper
"With a nod to Woody Allen's story 'The Whore of Mensa' Koestenbaum proffers that largest of sex organs—the mind—and entices with erudite and smuttily trenchant wit. Charming, teasing, brainy and slightly Seder-Masochistic, this collection asks that age-old question, 'Is Crisco Kosher?' The answer might surprise you" — D. A. Powell
"Acclaimed for work in queer studies and queer theory that includes books on opera divas, Andy Warhol and Jackie Onassis, the New York-based Koestenbaum is first and foremost a poet (as well as an accomplished pianist). His fifth book of verse ranges widely, entertainingly, sometimes bizarrely through fears, loves, tastes and obsessions: movie stars, middle age, cats, social theory, the meaning of cool and the significance of the poet's mother (the poet Phyllis Koestenbaum), who often appears in his dreams ("Sometimes I call my mother `Bob' "). Koestenbaum's many short poems and shorter stanzas pivot between the quizzical and the chatty, between the simply fabulous and the merely strange, achieving, at best, a campy bravura with an undertone of dismay: "I love art/ history," he exclaims, "if only/ I were/ not exploding!" Admirers of Koestenbaum's early excursions may have a hard time putting these smaller, spikier pieces together; those who like their verse both cryptic and charming might consider them just the ticket." - Publishers Weekly
Interview with Peter Halley
Wayne Koestenbaum with Bruce Hainley
Listen Péter Esterházy & Wayne Koestenbaum in Conversation
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