Quartet

Author: Claudia La Rocco

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2020)

An elegy to four critical and poetic minds—Bill Berkson, Douglas Crimp, Kevin Killian, Sam Miller—Quartet is also a meditation on ancestors, on how those who are no longer here affect our way of being, of writing, of moving through the world. Poet, novelist, writer of and on performance, Claudia La Rocco weaves fragile threads of acquaintanceship and intimacy into a chamber piece of voices, attitudes, and gestures of attention, spurred on by the restless interplay of present, past, and page. Quartet's motifs run unpredictably along our sociality's frayed edges, seeking connections in the questions we're left with after the passing of lives and eras, inescapably edged by legacies of privileged belonging.