Acker, Kathy
Acker, Kathy ( 1947 – 97 ),novelist, poet, and performance artist, born in New York. On leaving university she worked as stripper and pornographic film actor, these experiences providing material for her first self-published short stories. Her style and subject matter were established in early novels like The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula ( 1975 ). Influenced by W. Burroughs , the poetry of the Black Mountain school , and the erotic writings of Georges Bataille, she rejected plot and character in favour of fragments of autobiography, plagiarized material, and disconnected dreamlike sequences of explicit sexuality and violence. In the mid-1980s she settled in London, where the UK publication of Blood and Guts in High School ( 1984 ) brought her a wide audience, and was followed by Don Quixote ( 1986 ), Empire of the Senseless ( 1988 ), and In Memoriam to Identity ( 1990 ). She...
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