Synopses & Reviews
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
"Camp Marmalade affirms the crucial incompleteness that compels an artist to persist in experimentation....Just where the memories end, in the present, new words are given fresh paint." Full Stop
Review
"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.…The point, or one of them, is to keep going." The Brooklyn Rail
Review
"This book presents a hallucinatory glimmer of what that life might be without granting precedence to any single method." Bookforum
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.