Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background
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Fast, obsessive, jumpy, tender, and joyful, the poems in Wayne Koestenbaum's Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background take his signature themes stardom, scapegoating, aestheticism, nudism, exaltation and cut them into serial strips: tidbits that employ techniques of pointillism, mosaic, grid, aphorism, litany, and philosophical investigation. The luminaries in this memory-theater range from Yvonne de Carlo to Hannah Arendt. A trip to Venice and an invocation to an eschatological ice-cream man are the two longest trysts in a book exquisitely composed of "bits" that betoken a new brutalism in a writer known for svelte cadences and artful dodges.
Wayne Koestenbaum
Wayne Koestenbaum is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author of thirteen books of criticism, poetry, and fiction, including a biography of Andy Warhol, and the acclaimed The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.
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