The Poetry Project

On Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian, eds. Hedi El Kholti and Robert Dewhurst

Tausif Noor

In 2011, Kevin Killian was inducted to the Amazon Reviewer’s Hall of Fame, an honor reserved for the top reviewers of products sold on Amazon.com. In the sixteen years from when he suffered a heart attack in 2003 and died from cancer in 2019, Killian wrote 2,638 reviews for the megaconglomerate’s website. Sometime around 2020, the tech giant, likely in its churn-and-burn pursuit of “innovation,” got rid of the webpage that catalogued the efforts of these industrious critics, but moseying around on the Wayback Machine you can find a cache of the leaderboard. There’s Kevin Killian, right between Seth J. Frantzman and FL Kayaker, and the 18,082 “helpful” impressions he left on his reader.

This exercise doesn’t really indicate the scale of Killian’s talent and charm, his wit, his idiosyncratic style—for that, I recommend poring over the scores and scores of tributes penned by the many writers and artists upon his death. Having arrived in the Bay Area too late to have ever met him at a Poets Theater gathering or see him preside over an event at Small Press Traffic, I was struck by the span and specificity of his contributions. Peruse the unwavering praise for Killian’s encyclopedic knowledge, read the anecdotes of his generosity and warmth, his presence at nearly every reading and gallery opening, and you’ll get a sense, as I did, of what Killian’s energy, attention, and love for other poets made possible. Reading these remembrances alongside Killian’s own writing makes sense of Killian’s love as a generative force. In his writing, Killian elaborated a camp attitude of adoration towards objects, situations, and celebrities, and sutured it to an unbeatable enthusiasm for other writers and artists, such that his writing often sounds like a love letter.

Desperately in need of that idiosyncratic mix of esotericism and admiration in writing, I eagerly pawed through the doorstopper edition of Killian’s Selected Amazon Reviews, printed to resemble a Library of America collector’s volume with its author’s face smiling—knowingly, cheekily—at its reader. It’s a testament to his boundless creativity and love for criticism and writing itself that Killian sustained the same wit, the same knack for mixing the dregs of the culture industry with his intimidating mélange of scholarly references, in texts that were likely never intended for the Amazon platform; then again, Jeff Bezos started the company to sell books. The editors’ smart decision to arrange the reviews chronologically (rather than by category) allows these juxtapositions to render Killian’s formidable intellect in full. It is an even more inspired editorial move to have Wayne Koestenbaum introduce the volume and Dodie Bellamy, Killian’s partner for over three decades, to close it. Whether read in chronological order or thumbed through at random, the reviews mix droll observation with sincere adulation (most of the reviews are gushing five-star endorsements) and playful caricature: on more than one occasion, Killian, who grew up on Long Island, moonlights as an American boy who grew up in rural France, playing pétanque.

If chronology’s juxtaposition provides much of the pleasure in this book, Killian’s comparisons enhance it. A fawning treatise on Travis Jeppeson’s Poems I Wrote While Watching TV and the poet’s taking up of Philip Lamantia’s mantle is followed just a few days later by an encomium to a teal boar-hair brush: “one of the most well-designed products in my medicine cabinet,” that offers a “satisfying” click akin to Charlie Watt’s “Honkey Tonk Women.” Killian could distill the essence of why something mattered and why you should care about it, as demonstrated by the opening review, of Amy Gerstler’s 2004 collection of poetry, Ghost Girl, which synthesized how poetic metaphors of femininity are imbricated into commonplace notions of spiritualism, but which also critiques the professionalization of poetry via MFA programs and the ever-more elusive teaching job. He likens Peyton Place (1957), with its trashy depiction of suburbia, as having a beguiling cinematography akin to the sepulchral music of Franz Waxman and the structure of a Victorian novel. Criticism of this caliber, succinct and personal, precise but with the right amount of candor, is rare to find in the most esteemed of magazines. For Killian to have woken up and completed this task day after day, to meet object after object with the same wit and humor, on a platform mostly intended for buying sundry household goods, is nothing short of a heroic endeavor. Where others found useless spambots and cheap imitations, Killian found occasions to celebrate the things that make life worth living, found things to live for. His Amazon reviews demonstrate the faith he had in the project of criticism as a form of serious attention necessitating not only a grasp of the object at hand, but how that object functions within the matrix we know as the culture industry.

And in Kevin’s industriousness as a critic, he sprinkles in his Killianisms, the camp flourishes that tickle the reader’s sensibilities and add a delightfully human touch to his productivity, or might we say, lovingly, his graphomania. Killian was effusive about the dead stars he favored in incredible final lines—as when he addresses Janet Leigh and her performance in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960): “You have left this earth for a better place than this. Go into light, Janet Leigh.” He pens a similar elegy to Christopher Reeve as Superman: “Losing you is an event we were none of us prepared for, because I think we were all expecting one day to see you walk again, so titanic were your reserves of heroism and courage.” I’m reminded of what Jonathan Flatley, in his 2017 study Like Andy Warhol—Warhol is another one of Killian’s frequent references, up there with Jack Spicer and Hitchcock—says about the Pop artist’s indiscriminate liking: liking is a fundamental form of affective openness to the world, a way of being vulnerable to differences and to each other, so as to expand the horizon of connection between real life and art.

Most endearing about Killian’s journey through Amazon’s SEO thickets is his enthusiasm for small press publishers and lesser-known authors, his peers and predecessors. Lynne Tillman, Eileen Myles, Joe Brainard, the Magnetic Fields’s 69 Love Songs—these cameos make sense and are welcome, but also making appearances are Robin Blaser and a volume titled Bugs & Critters I Have Known by Anne Heiskell Rickey, a poet whom he compares to Emily Dickinson. When Killian occasionally bares fangs, he also doesn’t shy away from politics. For instance, he rightly has no patience for Busby Berkeley’s anachronistic blackface in 1941’s Babes on Broadway. In a review of a safe sex memoir by Max Exander (the alias of novelist Paul Reed) that eschews “the language of porn,” Killian—having himself witnessed “the faces of those dying, raging in an indifferent era of government inertia or opposition”—bristles at the author’s neglect of the oppressive forces that allowed thousands to die of AIDS: “They, the state apparatus, tried to play it as though human rights were now in opposition to sexual rights.”

In her coda to the text on the five-year anniversary of Kevin’s death, Dodie Bellamy reminds us that Kevin’s efforts were never remunerated by Amazon, nor did he ever criticize the company in his reviews because he was never seeking to give “a simple fuck you to capitalism.” Killian was a consummate consumer and remarkable critic who understood—and I mean really understood—how vital it is to write clearly and with flair, to never sacrifice your own enjoyment of the object or the process of apprehending it, even if there was no highbrow audience to affirm your enjoyment, even if the task of writing seems pointless, difficult, or not worth doing. Reading this book, you surmise that for Killian, it was always worth doing.

Does it matter that he made some of his evaluations up from thin air? I doubt it. Killian had a kind of genuine enthusiasm that made itself known, and it gave his writing the distinctness that we so dearly need, here and elsewhere. I learned so much from reading these reviews, not only from the sheer breadth of their subject matter, but also from their form. The best critics are those who meet and surpass the bounds of their object of evaluation, and Kevin Killian is of a sort who makes you want to be a better critic: more honest, more precise, more playful. He was a master of the concluding line, so I will let him have this one, from his assessment of Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder (2005): “how vivid it all is, life, death, going away, coming back, the pulsating world.”

#278 – Fall 2024

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