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

First edition, paperback original, published by Serpent’s Tail, London and New York, 1997. Cover photograph by Della Grace; cover design by Keenan. Illustrated softcover; 175 pages; 13.5 × 21.5 cm. ISBN 1-85242-425-7.

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 condition not confirmed from the photographs.

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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