Seven American Deaths And Disasters

Description

In Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Kenneth Goldsmith transcribes words used by people describing events they had never prepared themselves to witness, as they unfurl. In doing so, he reveals an extraordinarily rich linguistic panorama of passionate description. Taking its name from the Warhol paintings of the same name, Goldsmith recasts the mundane as the iconic, creating a sense of prose poems that encapsulate both the Kennedy assassinations, that of John Lennon, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, 9/11 and the death of Michael Jackson.

Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called "some of the most exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by Publishers Weekly. Goldsmith is the author of ten books of poetry, founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), and the editor of I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, which was the basis for an opera, Trans-Warhol, that premiered in Geneva in March of 2007. An hour-long documentary on his work, Sucking on Words was first shown at the British Library in 2007. He teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive. He held The Anschutz Distinguished Fellow Professorship in American Studies at Princeton University for 2009-10 and received the Qwartz Electronic Music Award in Paris in 2009. In May 2011, he was invited to read at President Obama's A Celebration of American Poetry at the White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama. In 2011, he co-edited, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing and published a book of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. Goldsmith was invited to participate in dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany, 2012. In 2012, dOCUMENTA(13) published his Letter to Bettina Funcke as part of their "100 Notes-100 Thoughts" book series.

"...it's like nothing he's done. It knocks the air from your lungs." -The New York Times "This book feels both like an important historical document and a beautiful example of what the Great American Novel might look like today." -The Paris Review "It mingles the language of radio and TV commercials with sometimes bumbling, sometimes heroic reports from journalists filing their first draft of history. 'Seven American Deaths and Disasters' is of a piece with Mr. Goldsmith's provocative literary aesthetic." -The Wall Street Journal "The high priest of what he calls Non-Creative Writing, Goldsmith continues producing books from found texts--in the case of Seven American Deaths and Disasters, he transcribes radio transmissions announcing famous deaths and other bad news. His new book is a textual equivalent of Warhol's Death and Disaster paintings, ripped from the front pages of the Daily News." -Publishers Weekly "Goldsmith's material, unmistakably real, refuses to remain in a literary frame." -Bookslut "Kenneth Goldsmith is always ahead of the curve! Just when readers were becoming used to his "boring" transcriptions of weather or traffic reports, he here reverses the game by turning his attention to the extraordinary: seven cases of assassination, murder, sudden death, or terrorism and how such unforeseen events have been handled by the feckless and unaware media. Seven Deaths is a real page-turner: you will feel you're there, living through the horrific events as they unfold." -Marjorie Perloff, author of "Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New" Century