Fat Art, Thin Art - Paperback

by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Author)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is best known as a cultural and literary critic, as one of the primary forces behind the development of queer and gay/lesbian studies, and as author of several influential books: Tendencies, Epistemology of the Closet, and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. The publication of Fat Art, Thin Art, Sedgwick's first volume of poetry, opens up another dimension of her continuing project of crossing and re-crossing the electrified boundaries between theory, lyric, and narrative.
Embodying a decades-long adventure, the poems collected here offer the most accessible and definitive formulations to appear anywhere in Sedgwick's writing on some characteristic subjects and some new ones: passionate attachments within and across genders; queer childhoods of many kinds; the performativity of a long, unconventional marriage; depressiveness, hilarity, and bliss; grave illness; despised and magnetic bodies and bodily parts. In two long fictional poems, a rich narrative momentum engages readers in the mysterious places-including Victorian novels-where characters, sexualities, and fates are unmade and made. Sedgwick's poetry opens an unfamiliar, intimate, daring space that steadily refigures not only what a critic may be, but what a poem can do.

Back Jacket

Fat Art, Thin Art" is a wrenchingly honest account--or enactment--of a writer's relation to her gift. . . . filled with hesitations, self-cancellations, erasures, and gratifying fireworks. The pleasure of "Fat Art, Thin Art" is witnessing Sedgwick discovering, again and again, the wonders--gorgeous shames and vindications--of what she can say."--Wayne Koestenbaum

Author Biography

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. Her many publications include A Dialogue On Love (Beacon, 1999); Tendencies (Duke, 1993); and Epistemology of the Closet (California, 1990).