Ultramarine
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The chromatic, linguistically playful, erotic conclusion to Wayne Koestenbaum’s acclaimed trance poem trilogy.
Ultramarine distills gleanings from four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015-2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust’s madeleine we head toward a “deli” version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne permit spells of fevered play with Italian, French, and German. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface, as if the poet were trying to figure out anew the nature of blue, pink, orange. Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language’s occult structures.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 22nd book from artist and writer Koestenbaum (Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background) distills four years of Koestenbaum's trance notebooks into a puzzling series of vignettes full of idiosyncratic details and questions, and references to painting. "#1 " wonders, "why did I equate words/ and genital sensation?// I remain uncertain about the function/ of suppositories// made a spontaneous/ mark with a leftover tube/ of auratic ultramarine,/ finger-smeared it/ to create abrupt/ punctuating lines—." In "#14 ," Koestenbaum remarks, "tranquilized bachelors in paradise grotto/ query my father's candy// describe spanking in detail/ as new hobby." There is a linguistic playfulness here that will appeal to some readers, as well as an insistence on modernity and the high-low duality of daily experience. However, meaning is often lost in these allusive and illusive fragments: "I devote/ elegiac Rachmaninof ballad/ to Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde,/ appropriate subject for a late/ Romantic threnody." Koestenbaum takes the reader on a strange journey, though those looking for cohesion or meaning won't find it here, and may even find the project impenetrable.
