We don’t have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities. —Kathy Acker

After (mis)reading Don Quixote, a boy transforms himself into “Janey Smith,” a character he glimpsed in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. The unnamed Catholic narrator wanders the streets of Pittsburgh, slipping in and out of gender roles, seducing men and women — erasing his sense of his own flesh. Sex and gender are joined in Janey—a dream—who becomes an atheist of desire, on a quest to become an imperceptible shadow.
Doug Rice (author of Here Lies Memory) channels Kathy Acker in this elegiac prose poem which will haunt the reader like a strange, erotic dream.
JANEY QUIXOTE
Doug Rice
Pocket Erotica No. 18
New Urge Editions
67 pp., $10; paper
ISBN: 978-1-7373711-8-2

Doug Rice is the author of When Love Was, Here Lies Memory, An Erotics of Seeing, Das Heilige Buch der Stille, Faraway, So Close, Between Appear and Disappear, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist, Blood of Mugwump, and other books of fiction, photographs, and memoir. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Zyzzyva, Gargoyle, Discourse, and Fiction International. He was a Literary Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, 2012-2014. He is the publisher of Nobodaddies Press, which will be reappearing in 2022.
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