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Selling the Collective: On Kevin Killian's "Selected Amazon Reviews"
Killian was a humanist of a sort, re-centering the individual experience on a site premised on selling to the collective.
They include metatextual and pop-culture references, engage in identity politics and gossip, explore gender fluidity, write openly about sex, and apply techniques traditionally used in poetry (such as lyrical language, rhythmic line breaks, and unusual punctuation). “Don’t let people tell you differently,” ( The Midnight by Susan Howe), he writes, “Hmmm, threatened much, Virginia Woolf?” ( The Life and Art of Elinor Wylie by Judith Farr) “And who received them?” “Her children, I guess,” ( Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation by Ellen Fitzpatrick). He ends with his own reasons for using smelling salts, citing wildly diverging examples: his grief upon learning of the death of Paul Walker from the Fast & Furious film franchise abuts Killian’s disappointment at not being selected for the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
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