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About the Author

BRUCE BOONE S published work includes Karate Flower, My Walk With Bob, Century of Clouds, The Truth About Ted, and with Robert Gluck, La Fontaine. In addition, Boone has translated the work of Georges Bataille, Pascal Quignard, and Jean Francois Lyotard. He lives in San Francisco. ROB HALPERN is the author of Music for Porn and Common Place, among other books.

Reviews

“Bruce Boone has the perfect cadence of a real writer, part awe, part critique. He can see.”—Peter Gizzi



“Boone is a master of this moment. Where everything that was under the surface—felt just below the surface of a story’s language—emerges suddenly.”—Thom Donovan, Poetry Foundation



“With three small books—My Walk with Bob, The Truth About Ted, and Century of Clouds—Bruce Boone established himself as a pioneer of a gay-inflected New Narrative in the 1970s and early 1980s.”—Tyrone Williams, raintaxi



“Boone’s easy-going, rare frankness, his thoughtfulness and awareness about the act of writing itself, his candidness and inclusivity about his aims and wishes, all make for a delicious and unabashedly charming writing style.”—Colin Herd, 3 AM Magazine

Bruce Boone is almost always right about everything. Ideas are like glittering objects, held to the light and examined from every possible angle, but he doesn’t forget that discourse is also a form of seduction. Rob Halpern’s collection arrives like a gift. Bruce Boone is the most perfect writer.—Chris Kraus



It seems like forever that Bruce Boone’s glorious work has been pressurizing people like myself who might have otherwise not sought infinitudes when writing prose and poetry. Finding him as a young wannabe Rimbaud-type boinked my ambitions and made me chase skill, and he still does. —Dennis Cooper



We writers in the Bay Area bicker often about the Bruce Boone that’s best, whether it’s Hippie Bruce, Existential Bruce, Marxist Bruce, Zen Bruce, Alien Bruce, Sub Bruce, Doomsday Bruce, or some Fugitive Bruce that’s escaped notice. The sum of these Bruces is, in more ways than one, the book you are now perusing. Not so much dismembered as remembered, bound together for the first time, each of these texts articulates discrete (and indiscreet!) themes that continue resonating through Bruce’s life and ours. On one page, I’ll find the ear turning toward a friend’s gossip. On another, I’ll find the hand reaching out in leftist solidarity. On another, I’ll find the lips parting with carnal abandon. The fact is, all the Bruces in Bruce Boone Dismembered hold their own lyrically, grippingly, sensually in the circumstances where they were generated and the uncertainty of our present.—Evan Kennedy



Bruce Boone Dismembered is an extraordinary record of the evolution of a politically engaged fiction writer, poet, critic, and theorist who has spent his career bridging commitments to “identity-based” queer literary movements, socialist labor politics, postwar avant-garde and experimental poetic traditions. In particular, the remarkable late-70s and early-80s essays on the academic reception of Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, the New Left, and the Gay Liberation Movement anticipate contemporary debates over the vexed relationship between “identity,” Marxist theory, and increasingly depoliticized, “post-critical,” and disengaged experimental writing strategies. What comes out clear in this inspiring collection of Boone’s works is a lifelong commitment to reimagining the possibilities of left writing in the US attentive to the strategic intelligence of emergent social movements.—Chris Chen