The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Bodies of Work by Kathy Acker
Trevor Dodge

Kathy Acker. Bodies of Work. Serpent’s Tail, 1997. 175 pp. Paper: $16.00.

Bodies of Work is an exquisite catalog of art and culture. Ever suspicious of any specter of control, Acker questions our various obsessions with the internet, the Marquis de Sade, bodybuilding, art cinema, fin de siècle Russia, and authorship/ownership with the appropriate amount of schism one would expect from the author of Empire of the Senseless and Pussy, King of the Pirates. “I question the works you’re about to read,” she writes in the final line of her introduction, diffusing the collection of conscious deliberation and opening up an entire dimension for exploration. Moving much in the way her novels do, Bodies of Work sketches a connect-the-dots approach to interpretation and meaning that is always searching for answers which may or may not be there, always filling worlds with avenues for possibility, and ultimately deciding that the journey itself is what creates our impressions of understanding.
Bodies of Work attests to Acker’s passion for life and art (one in the same and indistinguishable) once incorporated into her body of experience and pleasure. If the collection does have a consistency, it is the inexhaustible intensity and depth she attains in exploring her own desires. Like the meticulously drawn dream maps that have appeared in her novels, Bodies of Work showcases Acker as an artist wrestling with the nature of knowledge and, more importantly, how we come to know what we know through a language that is at best disheveled, disgruntled, and disembodied, serving whatever socio-politico-sexual end we can conjure to titillate (and possibly destroy) ourselves.
Read with the realization of Acker’s death last November after a long battle with breast cancer, her haunting introduction seemingly concludes the book before it ever begins. “All of us are faced, as perhaps we never before have been, by death,” she writes. Bodies of Work may in fact be her last will and testament to a world she lived and loved as wildly as it lived and loved her. [Trevor Dodge]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Bodies of Work by Kathy Acker Trevor Dodge Kathy Acker. Bodies of Work. Serpent’s Tail, 1997. 175 pp. Paper: $16.00. Bodies of Work is an exquisite catalog of art and culture. Ever suspicious of any specter of control, Acker questions our various obsessions with the internet, the Marquis de Sade, bodybuilding, art cinema, fin de siècle Russia, and authorship/ownership with the appropriate amount of schism one would expect from the author of Empire of the Senseless and Pussy, King of the Pirates. “I question the works you’re about to read,” she writes in the final line of her introduction, diffusing the collection of conscious deliberation and opening up an entire dimension for exploration. Moving much in the way her novels do, Bodies of Work sketches a connect-the-dots approach to interpretation and meaning that is always searching for answers which may or may not be there, always filling worlds with avenues for possibility, and ultimately deciding that the journey itself is what creates our impressions of understanding. Bodies of Work attests to Acker’s passion for life and art (one in the same and indistinguishable) once incorporated into her body of experience and pleasure. If the collection does have a consistency, it is the inexhaustible intensity and depth she attains in exploring her own desires. Like the meticulously drawn dream maps that have appeared in her novels, Bodies of Work showcases Acker as an artist wrestling with the nature of knowledge and, more importantly, how we come to know what we know through a language that is at best disheveled, disgruntled, and disembodied, serving whatever socio-politico-sexual end we can conjure to titillate (and possibly destroy) ourselves. Read with the realization of Acker’s death last November after a long battle with breast cancer, her haunting introduction seemingly concludes the book before it ever begins. “All of us are faced, as perhaps we never before have been, by death,” she writes. Bodies of Work may in fact be her last will and testament to a world she lived and loved as wildly as it lived and loved her. [Trevor Dodge]

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