Camp Marmalade

by Wayne Koestenbaum

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937658779
Publisher:	Nightboat Books
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

WAYNE KOESTENBAUM is a poet and cultural critic. His recent books include Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, and Humiliation. He lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

03/05/2018
Prolific cross-genre author Koestenbaum attempts to “assemble an/ entire life from found/ scraps” in this sequel to 2015’s The Pink Trance Notebooks. The stream-of-consciousness form, composed of many very short poems, continues here, congealing into a lengthy work of obsessions and candid ponderings. These fragments and assorted bits of condensed verse reveal a mind wandering from snapshots in a family scrapbook to Sharpie markings at a local glory hole to classical composers. Koestenbaum writes of the erotic, the highbrow, personal defects, Proustian memories, and more, effortlessly sliding between deep cuts and film stills: “brothers, together in tub/ when father leaves,/ experiment with rubber ducks.” Such omniscient contortions and synaptic musings constantly refresh the text and hold the reader’s rapt attention. The collection is propelled by Koestenbaum’s ability to navigate hairpin turns between existential crisis and deliciously naughty sex joke in a single line break. The work is split into 40 sections, but these borders often feel artificial and unnecessary, as this text acts as one fluid unit with the end of one poem never feeling more weighted than any of the fragments that come before or after. Whether referencing La Bohème, Donald Winnicott, bondage gear, Brooke Shields, or a haunting dream of massaging a baby, Koestenbaum’s work entices in all its sui generis, subconscious musing. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Koestenbaum’s reflexivity is uncanny and gathers pathos from the very task of writing, which for him is tantamount to assembling a self. As Foucault put it, being gay 'is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to define and develop a way of life.' This book presents a hallucinatory glimmer of what that life might be without granting precedence to any single method.”—Felix Bernstein, Bookforum


“Camp Marmalade affirms the crucial incompleteness that compels an artist to persist in experimentation. Beneath the cultivated glaze of an esthete is a hot mess of creativity, a hormonal jumpiness. The remembered children and burping infants in Camp Marmalade’s dreamscapes give permission for poet and reader to begin again. Just where the memories end, in the present, new words are given fresh paint.”—Christopher Wood, Full Stop


“Koestenbaum, who is also a musician and a visual artist, is here sliding between different artistic media to find or forge a different, spontaneous gesture of motion, inhabiting his painter-self at times to draw upon and re-draw the orality of poetry into a haptic unveiling, a tactile action that insists upon—and requires—the repetition of strokes, the muscle memory of touch; so much like applying makeup; so much like self-presentation as an action-in-process with an indeterminate end. The point, or one of them, is to keep going.”—Chris Campanioni, The Brooklyn Rail

From the Publisher