Selected Amazon Reviews. Kevin Killian. Semiotext(e), 2024. 704 pages.
Dear Gramma,
How big is my brain?
Only asking because of the book you sent me for Valentine’s Day.
It’s weird.
Love,
Joey
P.S. What is a Billy Collins problem?
Dear Muffin-Pie Sweetie-Donut Candy Bar,
I know you hate when I call you that, but I think Kevin Killian would applaud—and you know how much I love to hear clapping, which is something that happens—a lot!—in the book I sent you. Now, my question for you, Joey: how many kinds of clapping are there? Some clapping isn’t pretty (and I hear Mr. Killian clapping against Amazon’s damnable river of goods and not-so-goods). Some clapping sounds from soggy hands (that might be the Billy Collins problem, my dear; those who’ve wept into the very mitts that helped them write in the first place. And here’s the fabulous Killian fairness: there are those who weep out of jealousy, and those who weep out of comparative despair [“How can he be a famous poet?!”]). Kevin doesn’t care. He just wants to get all the mojo out of the way so that he can say what he has to say. To quote Mr. K, but to flip the compliment back on him, “There will be few books in this decade with the éclat or the brilliance of [Selected Amazon Reviews]. [He’s] so good he doesn’t even have to try and yet [he] does, again and again.”
I wish our friend wasn’t quite as fair, however, to Ezra Pound. Ask me about that some other time.
Love,
Grandma
P.S. - I hope you will write something someday as sweet about me when I pass on, as Kevin did about Janet Leigh, in his review of Psycho (Collector’s Edition). Just don’t thank me for how well I’ve screamed. (That’s your mother’s fault, in any case.)
~
Dear Professor Stolz,
Are you proud of me? I read the indices first. (And I can spell that word, too. I repeat: are you proud of me?) Guess what book I’m talking about.
Here’s a hint, as well as a question for you: what do Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Spicer, and Andy Warhol have in common? (This is a test, prof. Your class review depends upon answering correctly.)
Your favorite student,
Joe
Dear Favorite Student,
F is for favorite, yes. It’s also for framed, which is what you’re doing to me, in making this threat. F is also the grade you’ll get if you don’t start showing up to class.
But my answer is 1, 2, 3, in the order of those you’ve mentioned. 21 references to Alfred Hitchcock, and 18 for Jack Spicer. Sliding into third place, (and I wish I could see his face, if he knew), 15 mentions of Andy Warhol, in the index of Kevin Killian’s magical monstrosity.
My question for you: why are these three winning the tally? I’ll answer: Killian is telling us all about himself. Hitchcock wins because Killian hides, just like Alfred did in every movie, an errant visitor in the background of his own films. Killian does the same, his deliciously opinionated person flagrantly hiding in every review, fabricating a fiction that turns ever truer because of his intent: to help you see the you to whom he speaks (which is absolutely every single one of us, thanks to Killian’s cosmic comedy of inclusion). Confused? Me, too. And that’s the methodology of Killian’s spear-point; rather, how Killian goes in for the kill. He stabs at that which moves. And at the risk of sounding like a Jesuit (Hopkins appears on p. 505, helping Killian make fun of Roethke. I’ll go to confession on his behalf), Killian slices open the intestines of his own movements and counter-movements, as if to augur who leads to whom in his pantheon of mentioned persons. Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl” is Killian’s method of getting to Jack Spicer, our second-place winner, who was among the first to hear Ginsberg read his masterpiece at the Six Gallery, which Spicer helped form. Andy Warhol’s estate auction is the opening (or Killian’s periaktoi, that theatrical “trick” of turning a scene, quite literally and physically, into another scene) whereby we learn about the late auctioneer Robert Wooley, whose “gaucheries and nonstop bitchiness” Killian says are forgivable, since we’re all bargain hunters in the end, and life’s best deals (which, Killian says, include his wife) are worth bragging about. If that chain of omnipresence doesn’t sound like air, or one’s heartbeat, or the goddamned reliability of the sun, then I don’t deserve to be your professor. Killian’s blessedly bloated tome maintains its constancy of Hitchcock-like appearances that ultimately say “Everything’s gonna be okay,” even in the midst of horror. Can you think of a better book to come out and into the world at a better time?
Best,
Prof. Stolz
P.S. - You didn’t mention Barbra Streisand, whose lowly tally of two mentions in this seven-hundred-page book deserves at least a raised eyebrow, for reasons we can discuss at your leisure. Though perhaps it has to do with Streisand’s face, as Killian writes in his review of Meet the Fockers: “Whoever did Streisand’s makeup should be taken out to the Everglades and shot like a croc.” See you in class…or else.
~
Dear M,
The secret’s out: there is no backstage, according to Killian. Well, according to his apt eye, whereby what happens behind the tormentors (did you know those curtains onstage are called that?) of history can’t truly hide anything other than who the next actor will be to step into the story of humankind.
By the way, what is the story behind the burn in Leonard Bernstein? Asking for a friend.
love,
J
Dear J,
Everything belongs, baby, as the mystics are wont to say, or as Kevin lives, and I do mean that. His reviews don’t just talk the talk; they walk it, too. He, too, knew what it meant to spend his life with an exasperating genius (like Charlie Harmon did, writing about his years as Bernstein’s assistant, in On the Road and off the Record with Leonard Bernstein), because Killian was an exasperating genius, albeit a beloved and regarded savant of the almost unsayable (cf. the book’s astonishing “Afterword” by Dodie Bellamy which includes T.S. Eliot’s “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” as evidence against those who’d speak garbage about the powerful poetry inherent in Killian’s reviews). Killian masterfully cuts through the crap: “One chapter of this is fun,” he writes of Harmon’s book about being Lenny’s right-hand man, “but at length it grows tedious and one longs for Bernstein and his complicated crew to get rid of the sad sack.” This is part of Killian’s quest, to unmask what’s messy, and bless it with an hilarious honesty, all while using that lowly contraption provided by one of the most capitalistic monopolies to have existed in the history of humankind: a written, five—or less!—star review. Killian revels in unpacking stories that have been disallowed by the corporate monster. “Just when it looked like [E.M.] Forster would die a virgin, he went to Egypt and met Cavafy and some sparks flew between them,” he writes in “The Man Who Wrote ‘Only connect!’ and the Connections He Made in Underground Gay Life,” his review of Wendy Moffat’s A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster. Killian’s review titles alone could form a poem all their own: “It Was Like My Brain Died and Went to Heaven” reviews Jennifer Packard’s A Taste of Broadway; Food in Musical Theater. Or for the Bernstein book, “Four Years of Hell, and Some Fun Added.” But Killian’s confession best describes the fire within that led him to do what he did: “The obvious philosophical problem is that I was [writing these reviews] without being paid, in the service of a huge multinational corporation that was killing bookstores and perhaps writing itself. But some defended me and said ‘He’s torquing the system from within; they’re not actually reviews, they’re poems,’ so it was a poetic project.”
Who says poetry can’t change the world, J?
Your friend in ripening and in the rhyming wildness of time,
-M
P.S. - Killian writes, in his review of Emily Curry Hitchingham’s All Men Scrapbook Pages: Inventive Ideas for Masculine Layouts that he’s “written many books, but never one as important as The Kevin Killian Scrapbook of Being a Man.” Bet he didn’t know he was prophesying the appearance of the book you’re holding in your hands right now, one born out of a monopolizing machine that ate up brick and mortar stores, but which has become a scrapbook all its own, putting other scrapbooks to glorious, giddy shame.
PDX-based writer and composer, Joseph Byrd’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Exposition Review, The South Carolina Review, Stone Canoe, CutBank, Pedestal, South Florida Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, and Novus Literary Arts and elsewhere. A Facilitator with Shakespeare Behind Bars, and a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, he is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, was long-listed for the Erbacce Prize, and is a nominee for the Nina Riggs poetry award. He was in the StoryBoard Chicago cohort with Kaveh Akbar. An Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, he is on the Reading Board for The Plentitudes. He is finishing his first novel as a Fellow in Fiction through the Attic Institute’s Atheneum master writing program.