Description
Flesh and Bone, by Steven Fraccaro
Poetry/Essays/Literature
ISBN 978-0-925904-43-0
$17 US
Flesh and Bone may be regarded as poetry, essay, fiction, or something else. Memory, mortality, and meaning are the subjects that haunt its pages.
A follow-up and extension of the author’s previous volume, Skeleton Keys, this latest work raises the stakes.
This is a beautiful book, concatenated from discrete, short, related ruminations on the state of the world, the future, the nation, technology, art, our mortal souls. While he is at it, the author summons Baudelaire and Cornell, Borges and Rimbaud. Flesh and Bone includes detective stories and tales of an earlier New York, with its lost voices and old sorrows. Not to mention the odd sorts who used to populate this place, the femmes fatales and the otherwise fatally flawed. There are stops elsewhere too, interludes in Montreal, Ravenna, and Paris, not to mention Johnson’s London. We meet Weegee and Warhol, Francesca Woodman and Courbet. We come to focus our attention on icons and iconography, simulacra, the sublime. And that’s what we’re left with—something sublime.
— Michael Gottlieb
About the author
Steven Fraccaro is the author of two novels, Dark Angels and Gainsborough’s Revenge, as well as of a book of essays, The Recalcitrant Scrivener. His current work Flesh and Bone was preceded by Skeleton Keys, a hybrid work intended to inhabit the space between poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. As the editor of Renegade Magazine, he published writing by Walter Abish, Ron Silliman, Kathy Acker, Peter Seaton, and Constance DeJong, among others. He has also written the text for NY Pier 34, a book of photographs by Javier Domingo documenting the clandestine 1980s art project that was ultimately destroyed.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.