Wayne Koestenbaum

Ultramarine distills 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. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface. Through interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne, Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language’s occult structures.

Koestenbaum's essay collection opens with a series of manifestos-or rather, a series of impassioned disclosures, intellectual and personal-and then proceeds to wrestle with a series of major cultural figures, the author's own lodestars and lodestones: literary (John Ashbery, Roberto Bolaño, James Schuyler), artistic (Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol), and simply iconic (Brigitte Bardot, Cary Grant, Lana Turner). It amounts to a kind of intellectual autobiography that culminates in a string of passionate calls to creativity; arguments in favor of detail and nuance, and attention; and a defense of pleasure, hunger, and desire in culture and experience. 

Koestenbaum guides the reader through the thirteen Marx Brothers films, from The Cocoanuts in 1929 to Love Happy in 1950, to focus on Harpo's chief and yet heretofore unexplored attribute-his profound and contradictory corporeality. Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo's body-its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, 'cute' pathos, and more. Moving from insightful analysis to cultural critique to autobiographical musing, Koestenbaum provides Harpo with a host of odd bedfellows, including Walter Benjamin and Barbra Streisand. 

Hotel Theory is actually two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of a hotels, and a dime-novel (Hotel Women), featuring Lana Turner and Liberace. (In the novel, the articles 'a,' 'an,' and 'the' never appear.) The two books, fiction and nonfiction, run concurrently, in twin columns. The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author's dreams, in literature, in film, and in history. Guest-stars in the nonfiction portion of the book include poets, philosophers, writers, and film stars. Hotel Theory is an oblique manifesto for a philosophy of being-here, being-anywhere. It is also a book about the disappearance of writing; in particular, of Walter Benjamin's suicide in a hotel room in Portbou, Spain. Hotel Theory is the place where writing disappears; it is also the locale where a new mode of theorizing (in fiction, in fragment, through quotation and palimpsest) makes itself felt.

By turns urbane, ribald, melancholic, and wry, poet Koestenbaum puts a new spin on the status quo notion of domestic arrangements. The 13 ottava rima cantos in Model Homes present a neo-Freudian tale of the goings-on both in the poet's present home and various events from childhood. It's part riff, part romp... Koestenbaum's metrical hijinks-what he calls form's 'striptease liberty'-land him firmly in the profound," wrote the poet Frank Bidart. 

Poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum's first novel shines a hot light on the treacherous crossroads of sex, death, family, and popular culture in a world peopled by piano-playing relatives, prostitutes, muses, and manipulators. Five years of breakdown separate pianist Theo Mangrove's last recital in Europe from his planned comeback. Overcome with the belief that Moira Orfei, queen of the Italian circus during the 1960s, must perform with him, Theo begins to write to her and to pen what may or may not be her cryptic replies into his notebooks. In a fugue of notes and troubling memories, Theo prepares for Aigues-Mortes, struggling with Moira's guidance towards one final, full celebration of the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite."