The chromatic, linguistically playful, erotic conclusion to Wayne Koestenbaum's acclaimed trance poem trilogy.

Ultramarine distills gleanings from four years of Koestenbaum's trance notebooks (2015-2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust's madeleine we head toward a "deli" version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne permit spells of fevered play with Italian, French, and German. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface, as if the poet were trying to figure out anew the nature of blue, pink, orange. Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language's occult structures.

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About the Author

Wayne Koestenbaum-poet, critic, novelist, artist, performer-has published 21 books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen's Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). In 2020 he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His literary archive is at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Reviews

"Urges, observations, memories, directions, and aspirations scissor, smear, and echo one another within and between verses demarcated by austere, unbroken dashes. The book is filled with carbonated queries-philosophical, literary, homophonic, ontological-that burst and fizz on ultramarine's oceanic, auratic surface. When Koestenbaum asks, 'Isn't art / a transcendent category?,' the answer can only be an emphatic yes."-Artforum

"If the voluminous allusions, usually divorced from context or analysis, are what a cerebral, queer, Jewish American culture vulture reared in the 1960s and '70s would predictably fall for... they often bestow pleasures deeper than passing giggles, uncovering, as Koestenbaum does while reading Simone Weil, 'the hurt, pocked portion / of being.'"-Harriet

"Koestenbaum, unflinching as he observes and notates his interior, brings a heroic quality to this poetic feat.'"-Rain Taxi

"Not only does Koestenbaum surprise us with content, but also with form. The text incorporates all manner of writing from dreams to factual news. It resists privileging one mode over another."-[PANK]

"This project, which began with The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and continued with Camp Marmalade (2018), is remarkable for many reasons... Each collection of trance notebooks reflects the degree to which Koestenbaum is attuned to real-time realities while he composes."-The Brooklyn Rail

"The final volume of his 'trance trilogy'-preceded by The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and Camp Marmalade (2018)-the collection is both a joyful language game and a bracing reminder that queer play is serious business."-The Yale Review

"In Ultramarine, Wayne Koestenbaum sifts through four years of trance notebooks to stitch together a revealing collage."-Library Journal

"Koestenbaum delves into paintings and the artistic process, using color as a metaphor through which to consider desire and memory."-Read Poetry

"There is a linguistic playfulness here that will appeal to some readers, as well as an insistence on modernity and the high-low duality of daily experience."-Publishers Weekly

Book Information
ISBN 9781643621159
Author Wayne Koestenbaum
Format Paperback
Page Count 400
Imprint Nightboat Books
Publisher Nightboat Books