In Memoriam to Identity - Softcover

Acker, Kathy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679738428 ISBN 13: 9780679738428

Publisher: Pantheon Books, 1992

Synopsis

For Rimbaud, it is the agony of love that confirms his identity, while his lover, Verlaine, is reluctant to sacrifice marriage. Airplane compromises her identity in sex shows while Capitol revolts against the identity shaped by her family.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

The doomed love affair between the poets Rimbaud and Verlaine; the rape of Airplane and her search for sexual oblivion; the child Capitol’s escape from her tortured family life into the cruel and fractured relationship with artist Harry. In these three separate narratives, Kathy Acker, drawing from both classic texts and Americana to produce a startling and inventive montage of history and literature, pornography and poetry, brilliantly explores the shifting and intangible nature of the self.

“'In Memoriam to Identity' is a wonderful riot. All the familiar Acker is here – sex shows, the living as dead, the Burroughs factor, dislocation and diatribe. Kathy Acker has put discordance to work, producing a narrative wit that seduces with style. Superbly ironic, it suggests a control that makes this her best writing.”
NEW STATESMAN

“'In Memoriam to Identity' is a weird, violent, searing, angry work, full of pain, desire and hate. Kathy Acker has invented a form of secret historiography, a language of shock and sensation that provides a vivid, disruptive, unsettling readout on the psycho-social trauma of our time.”
LOS ANGELES TIMES

“Kathy Acker is a comic, foul-mouthed punk William Blake attempting a shotgun wedding of heaven and hell designed to turn contemporary literary consciousness inside out as well as upside down.”
NEW YORK TIMES

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0679738428
• ISBN 13: 9780679738428
• Binding: Paperback