
MFAW-VT faculty member Douglas A. Martin’s book, Acker, is reviewed in this week’s New York Times Book Review.
“Whether the reader is an Acker novice or an aficionado, seeing that insistently transgressive artist through Martin’s eyes offers new insights into her brilliance and bombast….She wanted, Martin writes, “to dispense with bindings, their conventions, of gender, of genre, to overflow them, to make her own way more unlawfully embedded with others, their lives, their words, and by extension, make her own more awe-filled.” Resisting hagiography by way of compassionate yet unsparing scrutiny and quotation, he honors and expands on that legacy, revealing Acker not in any single light but fittingly refracted.”
The first academic paper I ever gave was an examination of Kathy Acker and William Faulkner in relation to one another. I’m thrilled to see a book dedicated to examining some of her work.