"This is a book worthy of its subject: singular, unpredictable, a mongrel that occupies that rare, evocative space between genres. Expressing truths that transcend the stolid facts of conventional biography and literary analysis, Douglas A Martin reveals how the act of writing is also, always, an act of self-authorship, of identity destruction and creation—and how Acker took this process to an extreme that still stuns, confounds, and inspires." ASTRA TAYLOR
ACKER
"Douglas A. Martin’s ACKER is exactly the kind of literary criticism I want to read right now: an open-ended yet utterly thorough record of one deft, curious, intrepid mind beholding another. Whatever I knew or felt about Acker, this book has changed and expanded it. By placing her work and life in a variety of contexts, Martin not only pays close attention to the canon Acker created for herself, but also constructs a new one, tracing a new (feminist, queer, non-dogmatic) silvery thread through 20 century art, poetry, fiction, theory, and philosophy. Martin’s methodology is meditative, probing, roomy; his voice generous, tender, eloquent. Personal when he needs to be and clinical when his investigation calls for it, Martin acts as the perfect counterpoint to Acker’s all caps bombast. Acker has long deserved such a smart, caring study; anyone who cares about present and future possibilities of criticism has cause to be grateful, too." MAGGIE NELSON
