City Lights and tender buttons press celebrate new editions of Dodie Bellamy’s classic works.
Cunt Norton and The Cunt-Ups
Dodie Bellamy will be joined by Lee Ann Brown, Maxe Crandall, Marcella Faustini, Jason Morris, and London Pinkney
In CUNT NORTON, the sequel to her unforgettable CUNT UPS, Dodie Bellamy “cunts” The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1975 edition), setting her text-ravenous cut-ups loose to devour the canonical voices of English literature. The texts that emerge from this sexual-linguistic encounter are monstrous, beautiful, unashamed: 33 erotic love poems (“the greatest fuck poem in the English language,” according to Ariana Reines) that lust after the very aesthetic they resist. “These patriarchal voices that threatened to erase me—of course I love them as well,” Bellamy writes. Even as CUNT NORTON dismembers the history of English poetry, “cunting” Chaucer and Shakespeare, Emerson and Lowell, it simultaneously allows new sexual members to arise and fill in the gaps, transforming the secret into the explicit, the classically beautiful into the wonderfully grotesque. Bellamy’s cunted texts breathe life into literary “masters” with joy, honesty, hilarity, and insatiable passion.
Dodie Bellamy’s CUNT-UPS–first published in 2001 and recipient of the Firecracker Award for Innovative Poetry–was immediately a controversial and celebrated work. Using the “cut-up” technique of William S. Burroughs, CUNT-UPS is a work of sex magick, based on source texts from old lovers and Jeffery Dahmer transcriptions.
Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, nonfiction author, journalist and editor, known for her non-traditional use of sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation. Her work is frequently associated with that of Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles. She is one of the originators in the New Narrative literary movement, which attempts to use the tools of experimental fiction and critical theory and apply them to narrative storytelling. Her Ugly Duckling chapbook BARF MANIFESTO (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008) was named best book of 2009 under 30 pages by Time Out New York. Other books include the buddhist (Publication Studio, 2011), Academonia (Krupskaya, 2006), Pink Steam (Suspect Thoughts Press, 2005), The Letters Of Mina Harker (Terrace Books, 2004) Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997, a Nightboat Books anthology she edited with Kevin Killian; and When the Sick Rule the World, her third collection of essays (Semiotext(e), 2015). Her reflections on the Occupy Oakland movement, The Beating of Our Hearts, was published as a chapbook in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and The Tv Sutras was released by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2014. Her most recent book is Bee Reaved (Semiotext(e)2021)
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/