The Mumpsimus

David Wojnarowicz, untitled (Face in Dirt) Each painting, film, sculpture or page of writing I make represents to me a particular moment in the history of my body on this planet, in america. Therefore each photograph, film, sculpture and page of writing I make has built into it a particular frame of mind that only I can be sure of knowing, given that I have always felt alienated in this country, and thus have lived with the sensation of being an observer of my own life as it occurs.  --David Wojnarowicz,  Close to the Knives * Reading the early chapters of Cynthia Carr's biography of David Wojnarowicz, Fire in the Belly , provides an experience I can't recall in any other biography: the utter uncertainty of witness. Again and again, Carr presents an event as one person remembered it, then follows with other participants' very different recollections. Works of biography and history regularly present varying versions of events, but will usually take side...

This review was first published in the Fall 2019 issue of Rain Taxi Review of Books . Anne Boyer's The Undying  went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. (I have kept the page references in my text that are provided for the Rain Taxi copyeditors, but which are cut from the printed version.)  This review in many ways intersects with my later essays  on Zambreno's  Drifts and  Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts , parts of something I've been thinking of as "the asterisks project". What will come of it, I don't know, but it is ongoing, in fits and starts (more fits than starts these days, but c'est la vie). Screen Tests Kate Zambreno Harper Perennial ($16.99) The Undying Anne Boyer Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($26.00) reviewed by Matthew Cheney In Screen Tests , a collection of prose pieces, Kate Zambreno says that she writes to “announce to myself, as well as to the drifts of former intimates that amass into one giant coronary heartbreak, t...

At my author website, I've published an essay titled "Asterisks for Dead Astronauts". It is an exploration of reading, grief, poetry, the end of the world. It began as an essay about Jeff VanderMeer's recent novel Dead Astronauts and then ... sprawled. The essay has a lot in common with my recent post here on Kate Zambreno's Drifts , and, indeed, the post was deliberately meant as a kind of companion piece. (It doesn't matter the order you read them in, but I do think they benefit from each other.) I'm slowly working toward a new book project called Asterisks . I don't know that the form, shared between the two pieces, will hold for a book-length work, but the general concerns are ones I'm continuing to explore, and the style feels right, and adaptable. I wrote "Asterisks for Dead Astronauts" last fall, and it has gathered rejections from publishers since December. I'm tired of sending it out, and can't think of another publisher...

* Kate Zambreno's new book, Drifts: A Novel , was written before the novel coronavirus upended the world and forced us all into more limited lives. But it is a book that feels of this time. Not of this time in subject matter, though its questions about how we make meaning and art and life are certainly heightened now. Rather, the book feels of this time in its structure, in its commitment to shards and fragments.  (Now, as a Nobel laureate once said, everything is broken .) Zambreno has made something of a career of fragmentation. A glance at her books might suggest monotonous similarity, all those unindented paragraphs separated by blank space. There are similarities, too, across the characters and voices. But each book is quite distinct. Each has a different focus, and they often have a different emotional core, a different sense of the problems or questions that inspired them. Like Jean Rhys, a writer clearly important to her, Zambreno writes books that often feel diaristic, mem...