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Serpent’s Tail

KATHY ACKER — Bodies of Work: Essays, Serpent’s Tail, London and New York, 1997

KATHY ACKER — Bodies of Work: Essays, Serpent’s Tail, London and New York, 1997

Publisher
Serpent’s Tail
Place & year
London / New York, 1997
Type
Artist Book
Format
Illustrated softcover, 175 pp.; first edition, paperback original
Size
13.5 × 21.5 cm
With
Cover photograph by Della Grace; cover design by Keenan
Condition
Good; general rubbing and surface marking to wrappers, light edge and corner wear, creasing around the spine, and visible fading along the spine and rear fore-edge; interior not confirmed.
Register
TNR-2026-0441 · 25 July 2026
Regular price £75
Regular price Sale price £75
Sale Placed
Register No. TNR-2026-0441
Registered 25 July 2026
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Quantity

Shipping: UK £7, free over £50 · Europe £18 · US & Canada £25 · Rest of world £30.
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Notes

ISBN 1-85242-425-7.

Acker’s first collected volume of essays moves across art, cinema, politics, bodybuilding, science fiction and urban life, with writing on Peter Greenaway, Samuel Delany, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade and David Cronenberg’s Crash. Rather than separating criticism from autobiography, Acker repeatedly returns language to the body: trained, sexualised, disciplined, ill and politically controlled.

Published during the final year of Acker’s life, the book gathers the critical structure running beneath her fiction. Della Grace’s portrait and the divided pink-and-black typography present the writer simultaneously as author, image and body of work.

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