I took this book at just about an essay per day. Just don’t be afraid to bounce around from essay to essay if you need to. I think ultimately, this book is worth picking up for the moments that will shine for you - and there will be some. And yet other essays drew me in and held me there I particularly liked the ones where he provided writing exercises, the opening essay about chance encounters with two people in NYC, the one about his piano, and the one about words and grammar. I was also glad to be reading on an ereader with a dictionary functionality, because he uses a lot of intense vocabulary words. I wasn’t very familiar with a lot of the people Koestenbaum referenced or critiqued, so those essays were hard for me. I just don’t necessarily think I was this book’s best reader. They have lots of different formats and structures, ranging from critique of culture to journal observations to artistic exercise instruction. The book’s not long, but it features quite a few essays, divided into several smaller sections. There’s no doubt that Wayne Koestenbaum is whip smart, astute, and well written.

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this book, although they net positive. Thank you to Soft Skull Press and NetGalley for providing me with a review copy of this book! It will be published May 5, 2020. 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.” Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play.Īll my reviews live at. 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. Koestenbaum dreams about a hand job 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.

In his new nonfiction collection, 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.

Figure It Out by Wayne Koestenbaum