Bruce Boone Dismembered: Poems, Stories, And Essays
A comprehensive collection of nearly five decades of writing by one of the founding writers and theorists of New Narrative
Fiction
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Bruce Boone Dismembered collects nearly five decades of writing by Bruce Boone, a founder of New Narrative and critical figure at the crossroads of late-twentieth-century avant-garde and social movement writing. At once sexy and political, gossipy and scholarly, this crucial volume includes poems, stories, essays, interviews, and reviews.
In a time of disorder and disease, Boone’s body of work acts as a mirror to our dismembered global reality. This scavenged, collaged, taped-together collection provides a “map to negotiate perils” and guides us toward reconciliation with perilous futures. This book exemplifies the poignancy that might emerge from the found and frenetic.
Praise
Bruce Boone is almost always right about everything. Ideas are like glittering objects, held to the light and examined from every possible angle, but he doesn’t forget that discourse is also a form of seduction. Rob Halpern’s collection arrives like a gift. Bruce Boone is the most perfect writer.
-Chris Kraus
It seems like forever that Bruce Boone’s glorious work has been pressurizing people like myself who might have otherwise not sought infinitudes when writing prose and poetry. Finding him as a young wannabe Rimbaud-type boinked my ambitions and made me chase skill, and he still does.
-Dennis Cooper
We writers in the Bay Area bicker often about the Bruce Boone that’s best, whether it’s Hippie Bruce, Existential Bruce, Marxist Bruce, Zen Bruce, Alien Bruce, Sub Bruce, Doomsday Bruce, or some Fugitive Bruce that’s escaped notice. The sum of these Bruces is, in more ways than one, the book you are now perusing. Not so much dismembered as remembered, bound together for the first time, each of these texts articulates discrete (and indiscreet!) themes that continue resonating through Bruce’s life and ours. On one page, I’ll find the ear turning toward a friend’s gossip. On another, I’ll find the hand reaching out in leftist solidarity. On another, I’ll find the lips parting with carnal abandon. The fact is, all the Bruces in Bruce Boone Dismembered hold their own lyrically, grippingly, sensually in the circumstances where they were generated and the uncertainty of our present.
-Evan Kennedy
Bruce Boone Dismembered is an extraordinary record of the evolution of a politically engaged fiction writer, poet, critic, and theorist who has spent his career bridging commitments to “identity-based” queer literary movements, socialist labor politics, postwar avant-garde and experimental poetic traditions. In particular, the remarkable late-70s and early-80s essays on the academic reception of Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, the New Left, and the Gay Liberation Movement anticipate contemporary debates over the vexed relationship between “identity,” Marxist theory, and increasingly depoliticized, “post-critical,” and disengaged experimental writing strategies. What comes out clear in this inspiring collection of Boone’s works is a lifelong commitment to reimagining the possibilities of left writing in the US attentive to the strategic intelligence of emergent social movements.
-Chris Chen
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Details
ISBN: 9781937658588
Paperback, 424 pages, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: May 19, 2020
Reviews
What matters, what has always mattered for Boone, is intimacy, communality, social life. His hope for the release of Dismembered is more of this. “I would like some people to call me up or send me an email, ask if we can have coffee, and have some new friends.”
Bruce Boone Interviewed by Evan Kennedy in BOMB
Evan Kennedy: Why the title Bruce Boone Dismembered?
Bruce Boone: It’s a very Bataillean title. It alludes to the name of his secret society. Acéphale, which means “headless.” Perhaps it also invokes the depersonalized state you seek when sitting in Buddhist meditation. The dismemberment indicates no more head, no more personality, no more selfness. I’ve been through Catholicism, existentialism, feminism, Marxism, Buddhism- I’ve done it all. I’ve devoted a lot of energy to these -isms, using them as telescopes to examine and scrutinize the world. They didn’t help much.
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Poetry
Poetry
Essay, Poetry
Poetry