It’s no surprise, then, that the essays in his latest collection covering the past 18 years consider topics as diverse as “My New Glasses,” “The Porn Punctum,” “Punctuation,” and “Rauschenberg’s Squeegee.” No matter the focus, Koestenbaum proceeds with an agile, sidling insouciance. Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history.”įigure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play from “one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today” (John Waters).Koestenbaum, or, as he was affectionately known as a child, Question Bomb, knows many things as a poet, writer, scholar, professor, artist, and performer. Call it Sabrina.” “Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed.” “Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness. He directly proposes assignments to readers: “Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Wayne dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg’s squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. A subway passenger’s leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for “stranger” Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend’s stinky feet. Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and “assignments” that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse.” “Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together. Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence.' ––Parul Sehgal, The New York Times His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination. “Whatever his subject―favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O’Hara―the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings.

Figure it out wayne koestenbaum