Fat Art, Thin Art
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is best known as a cultural and literary critic, as one of the primary forces behind the development of queer and gay/lesbian studies, and as author of several influential books: Tendencies, Epistemology of the Closet, and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. The publication of Fat Art, Thin Art, Sedgwick’s first volume of poetry, opens up another dimension of her continuing project of crossing and re-crossing the electrified boundaries between theory, lyric, and narrative.
Embodying a decades-long adventure, the poems collected here offer the most accessible and definitive formulations to appear anywhere in Sedgwick’s writing on some characteristic subjects and some new ones: passionate attachments within and across genders; queer childhoods of many kinds; the performativity of a long, unconventional marriage; depressiveness, hilarity, and bliss; grave illness; despised and magnetic bodies and bodily parts. In two long fictional poems, a rich narrative momentum engages readers in the mysterious places—including Victorian novels—where characters, sexualities, and fates are unmade and made. Sedgwick’s poetry opens an unfamiliar, intimate, daring space that steadily refigures not only what a critic may be, but what a poem can do.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is the first book of poems by Sedgwick (Tendencies), the author of several scholarly volumes important to the comparatively new and hot theoretical discourse that calls itself ``queer theory.'' Unfortunately, the theorist as poet proves intellectually challenging yet poetically predictable. Interestingly, the book seems to acknowledge an uncertainty about poetic talents, opening with a meditation on a muse ``graceless'' and difficult to sustain, and concluding with prose which nearly admits the book's longest narrative poem to be a failure. One feels that such humility is not a pose, that it is honest. And yet, the poetry itself seeks clarity and grace; it does not question the ``poetic'' as have some experimentalists. At her best in middle-length poems such as ``Everything Always Distracts,'' Sedgwick can at times approach the wit, intellect and discursive syntactical energy of Randall Jarrell or James Merrill. But her greatest strength is her subject matter, which often reflects the concerns of a contemporary academic culture: the struggle to reimagine gender roles, sexuality, transgressive sexual fantasy and behavior, and realities of disease and depression. If one can look past the awkwardness of her abstract diction and a dependence on loose, sluggish iambs and unimaginative prose rhythms, there is an extraordinary mind to be engaged here.
