Whatever his subject-favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O'Hara-the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings...Ditch your inner chaperone, he implores. Breach the cordon sanitaire in your mind...His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination...He crushes on evasion and ambiguity, but his own prose has always been distinguished by its tautness and agility...There is a feeling of watching a writer so allergic to cliche now interrogating his own moves, annotating his own cliches with diligent, affectionate exasperation. Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence. -Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Koestenbaum's writing, like his interests, is diffuse and gymnastic. Cutting a silhouette around white space with his longtime preoccupations of art, desire, form, famous people dead and alive, the work in Figure It Out embodies Lukacs's definition of the essay itself as 'an autonomous and integral giving-of-form to an autonomous and complete life.' It is in the non-pause that Koestenbaum draws a portrait of a consciousness, free and at its most utterly alive. -Tracy O'Neill, BOMB, Editor's Choice Prolific cross-genre author Koestenbaum attempts to 'assemble an/ entire life from found/ scraps in this sequel to 2015's The Pink Trance Notebooks. The stream-of-consciousness form, composed of many very short poems, continues here, congealing into a lengthy work of obsessions and candid ponderings. These fragments and assorted bits of condensed verse reveal a mind wandering from snapshots in a family scrapbook to Sharpie markings at a local glory hole to classical composers. -Publishers Weekly If one asked 'what is the point of poetry?' there would be an infinite number of answers. But Koestenbaum's most recent trance books offer a particularly compelling response: poetry is about facing what you don't want to face and what you've always wanted to face at the same time. -Cody Delistraty, Poetry Foundation
