Bruce Boone Dismembered: Selected Poems, Stories, and Essays

by Bruce Boone, Rob Halpern (Introduction)

Bruce Boone is a critical figure at the crossroads of late twentieth-century avant-garde and social movement writing. Dismembered is the long overdue collection that spans nearly five decades of Boone's life, from the early 1970s to the present. Collecting published and fugitive works alike, from poems and narratives to reviews and essays, this volume is crucial for anyone moved by writing that is at once sexy and political, gossipy and militant, scholarly and aesthetic.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Literature

552 pages, Paperback

First published May 19, 2020

Reviews

[Erik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Though subtitled as a collection of poems, stories, and essays by the incontrovertible king of the West Coast New Narrative movement, Bruce Boone, "Dismembered" serves more as an oddly pasted together collection of meta-studies on writing and reviews of other writer's fiction with only a sprinkling of poetry and fiction interspersed.

"Dismembered" opens with several moving poems and then continues on into an incredibly thoughtful essay on the meaning of Frank O'Hara's poetry and its use of subversive, gay language. From that point, though, the book becomes a spiral of meta considerations on the meaning of writing. Though the book will be of clear interest to Boone scholars and those with interest in New Narrative, the book itself is edited and compiled in a way that makes it impossible to enjoy as a standalone book.

With little editorial guidance or reasoning, and with seemingly little thought than an attempt at chronology guiding the order of the works, this book, though full of essays, articles, interviews, and the like that I certainly would read on their own, is not something that can be enjoyed as a standalone work.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read full review at Jacket2: https://jacket2.org/reviews/pieces-bruce

Why call a collected Dismembered? Boone says the title points to Acéphale, “headless,” Georges Bataille’s name for his secret society in the thirties that braced for the coming dark with mysterious rites of sympathetic magic. Buddha’s there too, in the meditator’s state of acéphalité: “no more head, no more personality, no more selfness.”

Boone’s translated Bataille and meditated with Issan Dorsey, then Philip Whalen at the Hartford Street Zen Center near his home in San Francisco, so both frames fit. But I hear too in Dismembered the shrieks and gongs of the Maenads, tearing their god-king apart in a frenzy that lifts them above the numbing confines of ordinary life. A collection like this, stitched together from fifty years of poems, essays, fiction, and reviews, is bound to have a mortuary air, embalming the writer’s life and times for future readers to consume or inter on library shelves. If he’s got to go, Boone wants to give us a spectacle on the way out, a good old-fashioned Greek sparagmos to yoke us in the cultic bond of readership, Bruce our headless Orpheus, “the host to be eaten” so the social body might live.