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eriknoteric's review
2.0
Though subtitled as a collection of poems, stories, and essays by the incontrovertible king of the West Coast New Narrative movement, Bruce Boone, "Dismembered" serves more as an oddly pasted together collection of meta-studies on writing and reviews of other writer's fiction with only a sprinkling of poetry and fiction interspersed.
"Dismembered" opens with several moving poems and then continues on into an incredibly thoughtful essay on the meaning of Frank O'Hara's poetry and its use of subversive, gay language. From that point, though, the book becomes a spiral of meta considerations on the meaning of writing. Though the book will be of clear interest to Boone scholars and those with interest in New Narrative, the book itself is edited and compiled in a way that makes it impossible to enjoy as a standalone book.
With little editorial guidance or reasoning, and with seemingly little thought than an attempt at chronology guiding the order of the works, this book, though full of essays, articles, interviews, and the like that I certainly would read on their own, is not something that can be enjoyed as a standalone work.
"Dismembered" opens with several moving poems and then continues on into an incredibly thoughtful essay on the meaning of Frank O'Hara's poetry and its use of subversive, gay language. From that point, though, the book becomes a spiral of meta considerations on the meaning of writing. Though the book will be of clear interest to Boone scholars and those with interest in New Narrative, the book itself is edited and compiled in a way that makes it impossible to enjoy as a standalone book.
With little editorial guidance or reasoning, and with seemingly little thought than an attempt at chronology guiding the order of the works, this book, though full of essays, articles, interviews, and the like that I certainly would read on their own, is not something that can be enjoyed as a standalone work.
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