Fat Art, Thin Art

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Duke University Press, Aug 12, 1994 - Poetry - 160 pages
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is best known as a cultural and literary critic, as one of the primary forces behind the development of queer and gay/lesbian studies, and as author of several influential books: Tendencies, Epistemology of the Closet, and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. The publication of Fat Art, Thin Art, Sedgwick’s first volume of poetry, opens up another dimension of her continuing project of crossing and re-crossing the electrified boundaries between theory, lyric, and narrative.
Embodying a decades-long adventure, the poems collected here offer the most accessible and definitive formulations to appear anywhere in Sedgwick’s writing on some characteristic subjects and some new ones: passionate attachments within and across genders; queer childhoods of many kinds; the performativity of a long, unconventional marriage; depressiveness, hilarity, and bliss; grave illness; despised and magnetic bodies and bodily parts. In two long fictional poems, a rich narrative momentum engages readers in the mysterious places—including Victorian novels—where characters, sexualities, and fates are unmade and made. Sedgwick’s poetry opens an unfamiliar, intimate, daring space that steadily refigures not only what a critic may be, but what a poem can do.
 

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Contents

Who fed this muse?
3
Joy Hes himself today He knows me
9
Grave never offering back the face of my dear
10
Guys who were 35 last year are 70 this year
11
The Navajo Rug
12
A Vigil
13
The Use of Being Fat
15
For years it drove me crazy
16
When I got so sick it never occurred to me
30
Little kid at the airport practicing
31
In dreams theyre interchangeable
32
Our
33
It seems there are two kinds of marriage
34
One of us falls asleep on the others shoulder
35
Not
36
Nicht Mehr Leben
37

Performative Toronto
17
Performative San Francisco
18
What I would be when I grew up
19
Not like the clownish friendly way you talk
20
Sh
21
I can tune my mind today
22
All I know is I woke up thinking
23
Snapsh
24
Crushed Dilapidated
25
The 58 12 Minute Hour
26
How Not to Be There
27
Mobility speech sight
28
A scar just a scar
29
Im safe so long as the single feather of one wing
38
In dreams on which decades of marriage havent
39
Trace at 46
43
An Essay on the Picture Plane
72
Everything Always Distracts
74
Sexual Hum
76
New Haven Line
80
Poet
82
Sestina Lente
83
The Warm Decembers
89
Note on The Warm Decembers
151
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About the author (1994)

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY Graduate Center. Her many publications include A Dialogue On Love (Beacon, 1999); Tendencies (Duke, 1993); and Epistemology of the Closet (California, 1990).

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