Proxies

Past compunction, as in the lifewriting of Eileen Myles or Alison Bechdel, and incisive in the traditions of Roland Barthes and Guy Davenport, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the [...]
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Past compunction, as in the lifewriting of Eileen Myles or Alison Bechdel, and incisive in the traditions of Roland Barthes and Guy Davenport, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus that begin to unpack the essayist himself, weighing out his identity as a noted queer intellectual poet; his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central piedmont North Carolina; and his prospects entering middle age at the margins of the gig economy.
In Proxies an original compositional constraint, a total suppression of recourse to other authoritative sources, engineers the disarming mode of independent inquiry in which Brian Blanchfield addresses his rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, family and fallout, and subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia). The repeatable experiment to draw only from what he knows, estimates, remembers, and misremembers about the subject at hand often opens onto an unusually candid assessment of self and situation. The project s driving impulse, courting error, peculiar in an era of crowd-sourced consensus knowledge, is at least as old as the one Montaigne had when, putting all the books back on the shelf, he asked, What do I know? "