“There are no quiet lines to offset the exuberant ones in his work. Across Koestenbaum’s essays, criticism, and fiction, it’s rare to find a single paragraph that doesn’t contain some combination of the following: the imperative mood, a memory or dream, a fantasy or desire (not infrequently debauched), the name of a star or starlet or other glamorous proper noun, a jarring comparison or compound (i.e. “cum-bucket consciousness”), a description of an odor or texture, a literary citation, a self-reflexive gesture.Every passage is a carnival of confident poses and wry transgression, blending scholarly diction and voluptuary seediness.”

Zachary Fine reviewed Koestenbaum’s essay collection, Figure It Out, for Art in America.

Read the full review here.