What's New ... Oh! Pussycat? PUSSY, KING OF THE PIRATES by Kathy Acker New York: Grove Press, 1996 277 pages Review by Gérard Martin While some of the elements of this book are enjoying their moments, poet and San Francisco based performance artist Kathy Acker is not an easy read; nor, for that matter, is Pussy, King of the Pirates supposed to be anything so facile. Loosely adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Kathy Acker offers adventurous readers a feminist re-conception of this classic tale for boys. The ensuing journey reveals a powerful legacy of paternalistic cultural tradition. How humans, scared out of their minds, gather whatever intelligence they can put their hands on and put it all in a central penitentiary named "facts"... Lost somewhere between collapsing narratives and meandering character development, Pussy, King of the Pirates unveils herself in a solipsistic postmodern tradition of writing that writer-critic John Barth calls the "literature of exhaustion." When conventional forms of literary expression are discarded in favor of self-referential revision and recomposition, a kind of iconic atavism is left to sew the remaining fragments into new textures of equilibrium. Imagination arises when there's no more reason so the mind can make a kingdom For those who may be already familiar with Treasure Island, Kathy Acker reincarnates pirates Black Dog and Silver inside of a fuller cast of characters - some living, some dead, some dying. Stories and still more stories are told from the points of view of Ange, "O" for Ostracism (or maybe simply the letter "O" like the story of), and Pussy Pussycat as prostitute, famous poet and the pirate king of her body, her pleasure, and her world-straddling adventures. Through wet dreams, orgasms, story vignettes and a treasure map that arrives more than half-way through the story, aphorisms and subtle discourse prevail against a texture of sometimes foul but always descriptive contemporary language. Pussy is replete with a kind of taboo transgression "where our souls do not hover contemptuously over our land-bound bodies." I don't give a tinker's curse whether or not you're murdered in the process of us getting, and becoming, everything in the world we want. Pussy, King of the Pirates leaves readers simultaneously "trying" and "tried" on words - both to see how they fit and, probably more importantly, trying on how long they last. Beyond likes and dislikes, one question that remains is how do they, the words, all finally come together? Easy lay, this one is not.   You can buy this book online right now.

Gérard Martin Gérard Martin is a writer living in Southwestern Louisiana. Shingle on the Internet, his web hangs in Southern California.

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