Kathy Acker — Hello, I’m Erica Jong, Contact II Publications, New York, 1982

First edition chapbook / artist book. Contact II Publications, New York, 1982. [20] pp., stapled black wrappers. Approx. 17.9 × 21.5 cm / 7 × 8.5 in. Original artwork by Michael McClard. Printed by Cambrick Graphic Arts, NYC. ISBN 0-936356-09-2.

Condition: good vintage condition; rubbing and surface wear to black wrappers, light edge and corner wear, minor creasing, age toning to pages. Interior presents well, with binding intact.

First edition of Acker’s 1982 prose-poem chapbook, published by Contact II Publications in New York, with original artwork by Michael McClard. The title takes Erica Jong — already a public literary figure through Fear of Flying — and turns the name into a borrowed voice, mask, and false point of entry. Acker’s text moves through impersonation, address, confession, refusal, and theft. The book appears small and almost private, but its operation is public: a name is taken from literary culture and reissued through downtown small-press circulation.

The rear cover keeps the first economy visible: $3.00, ISBN, Contact II’s Bowling Green address. Not just bibliographic detail, but distribution data. A cheap stapled book becomes the vehicle for appropriation, literary attack, and self-invention.

Acker’s early-1980s work sits between punk literature, feminist disturbance, and postmodern appropriation. Her writing repeatedly plundered and reworked existing cultural material rather than treating authorship as fixed property; later accounts regularly frame her practice through theft, fragmentation, identity play, and the dismantling of literary authority.