Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background

Wayne Koestenbaum’s brilliant new collection is like a lurid coloring book of “Fauvist Depravity.” Playfully perverse, his poems reinvent the lyrical, satirical barb for our moment. And they’re as telling as they are outrageous. Where else could we meet “the Mrs. Robinson of Abstract Expressionism” or experience the joy of biting “the wolfman’s wombat ass.” This scholar of excess is off the cuff, over the top, and always on the money!Elaine EquiLike a desiccated David Markson novel, this addictively readable book of minimalist pop koans welds the body to the page. Strained through dreamspace, refracted by mediaspace and enacted in meatspace, these poems refute stability and certainty, opting instead for the irrefutable vageries of Koestenbaum's exquisitely tuned subjectivity.Kenneth Goldsmith