Staff Pick
Wayne Koestenbaum’s deep and wide knowledge of art and literature, his respect for sentences and punctuation, and his passion for ambiguity of form and function make these febrile essays a joy to read. With the exercises he suggests, and using his ecstatic influence as a guide, we can puzzle through our need for answers in writing, and find a new consciousness — like seeing our hometowns from above for the first time. Recommended By Adam P., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
"Whatever his subject — favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O'Hara―the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings….His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination….Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence. Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
"Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together . . . By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse."
Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and "assignments" that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger's leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for "stranger"; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend's stinky feet. Wayne dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg's squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences.
He directly proposes assignments to readers: "Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina." "Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed." "Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness….Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history."
Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play from "one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today" (John Waters).
Review
"Whenever I need to hit the reset button on my expectations, Koestenbaum is my touchstone….The quality of Koestenbaum's attention and his ability to delight and surprise is unmatched by any writers I have read.” The Rumpus
Review
"In what is probably the strangest and most delightful book of the year…Koestenbaum is an essayist and artist who comments on everything…with sharp script but little open sense of direction — beyond a wildly contagious curiosity." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Spiraling in structure and dizzyingly varied in theme, the essays are peppered with reveries and fantasies, suggesting a kind of ramble through Koestenbaum's consciousness….There's fun and games and erudition throughout." Publishers Weekly
Review
"This kind of prose could be overly chaotic in the hands of a lesser writer, but Koestenbaum has a knack for mostly keeping things together with sincerity, surprises, and wit." Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Wayne Koestenbaum's twenty books include Camp Marmalade, Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Humiliation, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen's Throat, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A new edition of his first novel, Circus; Or, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, was published in 2019. He is a distinguished professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. His website is waynekoestenbaum.com.