Fat Art, Thin Art
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Published:12th Aug '94
£79.00
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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.
"Fat Art, Thin Art is a wrenchingly honest account—or enactment—of a writer’s relation to her gift. . . . filled with hesitations, self-cancellations, erasures, and gratifying fireworks. The pleasure of Fat Art, Thin Art is witnessing Sedgwick discovering, again and again, the wonders—gorgeous shames and vindications—of what she can say."—Wayne Koestenbaum
"How often the fiercest, the most autonomous American critics have been poets; from Emerson to Blackmur, from Burke to Hartman, many a discursion could be illustrated, even illuminated by reading the ulterior verse. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is such another, and it will enrich certain enigmas she has proposed, as well as appeal to certain appetites she has awakened, to immerse in this element—fragmentary at its widest reach (a deconstructed Victorian 3-decker), healing at its most abrupt (‘the yard, the mud, the morning / in their new, punished clothes’), and ever searching for the makings of the dilemma. Such is the true poetics of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and of course it is the poetry as well."—Richard Howard
"Reading Fat Art, Thin Art is a thrilling experience. The publication of these poems will help to complete our picture of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick who, already recognized as one of the most extraordinary critics of her generation, now proves herself one of its truly innovative poets."—Maud Ellmann
"This is poetry of a great soul which presents to mind shapely and unmistakable presences brought very close to the eye. Fat Art, Thin Art is a work of poetic distinction and indispensable human use."—Allen Grossman
ISBN: 9780822315018
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 499g
168 pages