The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
Doors 7:30 pm
The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker, w Jack Skelley
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A Semiotext(e) book launch w readers, visuals and music
Jack Skelley performing fr The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker w videoz by Lydia Sviatoslavsky & soundz by Stephen Spera
Special guest readingz by Amy Gerstler, John Tottenham, Benjamin Weissman & Jackie Wang
MC Lily Lady
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blurbs
Fear of Kathy Acker is one of the great lost masterpieces of ‘80s experimental fiction. That it's no longer an inaccessible legend is huge.
-Dennis Cooper
Jack Skelley pours it on like sometimes blam blam blam like the riff in Death Valley 69 but mostly with a surfer’s rhythm like the cool throb of his guitar, his writing the poetics of pink love and punk pool splash action, the sound I adore.
-Thurston Moore
Despite the dislike of seeing my own name, you’re really a good writer – never what’s expected.
-Kathy Acker
bios
Jack’s Skelley’s books include: Monsters (Little Caesar Press), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press), Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing (BlazeVOX). In addition to appearing in many magazines, journals, etc, Jack’s work is widely anthologized. Collections include: Coming Attractions (Little Caesar Press, ed. Dennis Cooper), and Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry (ed. Jim Elledge, Indiana University Press.)
Amy Gerstler has published 13 books of poems, a children's book and several collaborative artists books with visual artists. Index of Women, her most recent book of poems, was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
Lily Lady is an artist and criminal from New York City. Lily’s full length collection quickie was published in 2022 and their chapbook BREAD, in 2023.
John Tottenham, a purveyor of magnanimous misanthropy and magical cynicism, he is the author of one novel, numerous essays, and three volumes of verse: The Inertia Variations, Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment, The Hate Poems. A new collection, Fresh Failure, will be published by Hat & Beard Press this autumn.
Jackie Wang is a poet and Assistant Professor of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void (Nightboat Books, 2021, National Book Award Finalist), and the forthcoming experimental essay collection Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (Semiotext(e), 2023).
Benjamin Weissman is the author of two books of short fiction, most recently Headless. His writing on books, art, and skiing have appeared in McSweeney’s, The Believer and Powder. A recent exhibition of paintings and sculptures occurred at The Pit. He’s working on a new book of stories and a novel. He teaches at UCLA & Otis College of Art.