Wayne Koestenbaum Selected Works

These engorged lyrics don’t rhyme; and though each builds on a carapace of fourteen lines, many of the lines spawn additional, indented tributaries, like hoop earrings dangling from the stanzas’ lobes. Koestenbaum’s poems are comic, ribald, compressed, symphonic. They take liberties with ordinary language, and open up new pockets for sensation in the sorrowing overcoat of the “now.” Imagine: the training wheels have been removed from poetry’s bicycle, and the wheeling flâneur is finally allowed a word pie equal to fantasy's appetite. Stubble—a libidinal detail—matters when you’re stranded on the archipelago of your most unsanctioned yet tenaciously harbored impulses.

Ultramarine is the chromatic, linguistically playful, erotic conclusion to Wayne Koestenbaum's acclaimed trance poem trilogy, distilling gleanings from four years of his trance notebooks (2015-2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. 
 

A collection of whimsical, baroque, ribald, and heartbreaking fables that take the gloom and melancholy of our political moment and find subversive solace by overturning the protocols of tale-telling. The adventures in The Cheerful Scapegoat cross a comedy of manners with a Sadean orgy, and language has its own desires: figures of speech carry an erotic charge that straddles slapstick and vertigo. These stories take the tchotchkes of queer culture—codes and signifiers—scrambles them together, and blows them up into an improbable soufflé.

Poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world, dreaming about a handjob from John Ashbery, swimming next to Nicole Kidman, and reclaiming Robert Rauschenberg’s squeegee. Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play.