Kathy Acker: Blood and Guts in High School

Grove Press, 1998, softcover, 165 pages, 16 x 24 cm 

Good condition. The cover and outside of the pages show signs of age and wear

This is a book about feminism, capitalism, sex, punk, youth, the city, the literary giants, anger, infatuation and the USA. A teenage coming-of-age story and a glorious, delirious patchwork of prose, poetry, drama, plagiarism and illustration. Childlike sexual drawings pepper the book, along with Acker’s surreal, minutely detailed, annotated ‘dream maps’. 

This is the story of Janey, who lived in a locked room, where she found a scrap of paper and began to write down her life. It’s a story of lust, sex, pain, youth, punk, anarchy, gangs, the city, feminism, America, Jean Genet and the prisons we create for ourselves. A heady, surreal mash-up of coming-of-age tale, prose, poetry, plagiarism and illustration, Kathy Acker’s breakthrough 1984 novel caused huge controversy and made her an avant-garde literary icon.