Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria, J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis on sexuality, a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound), even the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge: men making books together. Wayne Koestenbaum's startling interpretation of literary collaboration focuses on homosexual desire: men write together, he argues, in order either to express or to evade homosexual feelings. Their writing becomes a textual intercourse, the book at once a female body they can share and the child of their partnership. These man-made texts steal a generative power that women's bodies seem to represent. Seen as the site of a struggle between homosexual and homophobic energies, the texts Koestenbaum explores - works of psychoanalysis, sexology, fiction, and poetry - emerge as more complex, more revealing. They crystallize and refract the anxiety of male sexuality at the end of the last century, and open up a deeper understanding of connections today between the erotic and the literary. Drawing upon the work of feminist critics, Koestenbaum connects male collaboration and the exchange of women within patriarchy: he peers into both medical texts and imaginative literature, disturbing our ready acceptance of the co-authored work. This strong and unsettling book transforms our understanding of the creative process, providing a new sense of what both collaborative and solitary artistry mean.

"Hotel Theory" is two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of hotels, and a dime novel ("Hotel Women") featuring Lana Turner and Liberace. Typical of Wayne Koestenbaum' s invigoratingly inventive style, the two books - one fiction, one nonfiction - run concurrently, in twin columns, and the articles " a, " " an, " and " the" never appear. The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author' s dreams as well as in literature, film, and history. Guest stars include everyone from Oscar Wilde to Marilyn Monroe. "Hotel Theory" gives (divided) voice to an aesthetic of hyperaesthesia, of yearning. It is an oblique manifesto, the place where writing disappears. A new mode of theorizing - in fiction, in fragment, through quotation and palimpsest - arises in this dazzling work.

Fast, obsessive, jumpy, tender, and joyful, the poems in Wayne Koestenbaum's Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background take his signature themes--stardom, scapegoating, aestheticism, nudism, exaltation--and cut them into serial strips: tidbits that employ techniques of pointillism, mosaic, grid, aphorism, litany, and philosophical investigation. The luminaries in this memory-theater range from Yvonne de Carlo to Hannah Arendt. A trip to Venice and an invocation to an eschatological ice-cream man are the two longest trysts in a book exquisitely composed of "bits" that betoken a new brutalism in a writer known for svelte cadences and artful dodges.

Wayne Koestenbaum knows how to drop the language in the blender of the imagination and hit frappe! The 13 ottava rima cantos in Model Homes present a neo-Freudian tale of the goings-on in the poet's present home and various events from his childhood. Modulating a voice that is urbane and ribald, melancholic and wry, Koestenbaum puts a memorable spin on the status quo notion of domestic arrangements. Wayne Koestenbaum holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. He was co-winner of the 1989 Discovery/ The Nation poetry contest, has published three books of poetry and three books of prose, and writes frequently for The New York Times Magazine , The London Review of Books and other periodicals. He lives in New York, NY.

The Pink Trance Notebooks is the product of the year Wayne Koestenbaum stopped keeping the traditional journal he had maintained for three decades and began a series of "trance notebooks" as a way to reflect an intensified, unmoored consciousness. The resulting sequence of 34 assemblages reflects Koestenbaum's unfettered musings, findings, and obsessions. Freed from the conventions of prose, this concatenation of the author's intimate observations and desires lets loose a poetics of ecstatic praxis--voiced with aplomb and always on point. "Wayne Koestenbaum is one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today. His alarmingly focused attention to detail goes beyond lunacy into hilarious and brilliant clarity." --John Waters

In The Milk of Inquiry, poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum has written his most beautiful book - more mediative and more provocative than his previous, much-praised work. The volume's most ambitious gesture is a long poem, "Metamorphoses (Masked Ball)," a sequence of 115 bawdy, speedy sonnets, spoken by mythological figures ghosting as historical personages - among them, Orpheus speaking as Elvis, Proserpina speaking as Freud, Adonis speaking as Cleopatra, and Daphne speaking as Wilde. The swirling disobedient voices form a closet drama, a splintered monologue, a shadow theater of violation and transfiguration.

Camp Marmalade takes the freedoms of trance utterance―unfettered verbal association, explicit auto-ethnography, erotic bricolage―and applies a more stringent sense of time-as-emergency to this liberation-oriented poetic method. Part diary, part collage, part textbook for a new School of Impulse, Camp Marmalade assembles a perverse and giddy cultural archive, a Ferris wheel of aphorisms, depicting a queer body amidst a dizzying flow of sensations, dreams, and sex-and-death distillations―whether sugary, fruity, bitter, expired, or freshly jarred.

Review The Answer Is In The Garden Asie (sheherazade) Cash The Debut (ode To Anna Moffo) Doctor Type Dog Bite Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: I Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Ii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Iii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Iv Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Ix Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: V Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Vi Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Vii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: Viii Erotic And Sepulchral Epigrams From The Cinquencento: X Est-ce Que Fantasia On My Father's Gift Faust In Seersucker Shorts Fugitive Blue A History Of Private Life L'indifferent (sheherazade) La Flute Enchantee (sheherazade) The Letter (ode To Anna Moffo) The Moving Occupations The Ornate And Lovely Corner House A Professor Young And Old Relics Of The True Cross The Square Of Swan Tea Dance -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® From Publishers Weekly In the title poem and centerpiece of this debut collection, 1989 "Discovery"/ Nation poetry award co-winner Koestenbaum writes, "Mired in low culture, / I was aching to reach the high."41 But it is precisely the low that allows him to exult in the lavish heights of the Metropolitan Opera, idolizing a diva who rises above the mundane only in her performances. Koestenbaum's own performances are formal and fluidly elegant: "I think that Anna / Moffo sings, / to this day, in a second, / parallel Met, a hologram of the original / projected in air, / where failing voices continue / to thrive amidst a system of strange geysers / and girders, cables / linking the golden prompter's box / to a sky that burns directly on the stage."45 His wit can become self-conscious, his metaphors heavy, but the unifying strength of the poems is Koestenbaum's burgeoning awareness of being gay, with all its emotional ramifications: "Thinking I was invisible, I wore the peacock / Blue and found I was too visible. I wanted to shock / My public into cheers, until I learned that they were primitives . . . / When Carla put her hand on Ricky's knee / I saw my future's blueprint. I was wearing pants of lapis lazuli."11 Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Half operatic libretto, half slangy conversation, Koestenbaum's first book of poems interweaves sophisticated urban wit with a sense of lost happiness ("I am a landlord of a sadness"). With Anna Moffo, well-known coloratura soprano (born in 1932 in Wayne, Pennsylvania) as muse and "favorite," Koestenbaum explores role-playing, sexual identity, friendship, homoeroticism, and art as a refuge from psychic discontinuity. Through his rapid-fire digressions and formally rhyming arpeggios emerges a longing for elusive interpersonal realities "in which the secret life is fully seen." "I read/ these urgent things too quickly, as if I were not fixed/ By what occurs, as cats, cards, and elections/ Are fixed." Koestenbaum's extravagant fantasies nurse "a foolish daydream" of opera as a metaphor of life. "I mail/ this letter,/ addressed to Miss Moffo, care/ of the mind's Met, where Broadway joins forgotten avenues."-- Frank Allen, SUNY at CobleskillCopyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.