After suffering a heart attack in 2003, the poet Kevin Killian found it difficult to write through the ensuing regimen of pharmaceuticals. ‘I couldn’t find my way to the end of a sentence, just drifted off, continuously happy, like a warm heroin or mescaline high’, he later recalled. At the suggestion of the writer Dodie Bellamy, his wife for thirty-three years, Killian began leaving regular reviews on Amazon; by producing simple things at first, a few words, eventually a line, he worked his way back towards writing. Killian’s poetry collection Action Kylie appeared in 2008; Impossible Princess, his third collection of short fiction, the following year; Killian’s long-awaited novel, Spreadeagle, begun in 1990, was published in 2012. Outside his window, San Francisco changed immeasurably over these years, as Silicon Valley’s venture capital creeped northward. Inside his browser window, Killian never stopped reviewing for Amazon, posting over a million words across more than twenty-four hundred reviews before his death in 2019.

Selected Amazon Reviews, recently published by Semiotext(e), arranges its selection chronologically, bookended with an introduction by Wayne Koestenbaum and an afterword from Bellamy, all wrapped by a mischievous cover, which makes the volume appear, at first sight, to be a prestigious edition issued by the Library of America. As a project, Selected Amazon Reviews has something in common with works that vampirize intertexts (Bellamy’s Mina Harker, Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe) or parasitize the argots of the marketplace (Harryette Mullen’s S*PeRM**K*T, Marie Buck’s ‘Whole Foods’). But Killian does not latch onto a single figure, text or form of rhetoric – instead, he luxuriates within the endlessly proliferating aisles of ‘the everything store’ and its cacophony of amateur critical voices. The poetry collections, baby food, novels, boxer briefs, rock albums, Hollywood films, Guys Gone Wild tapes, ballpoint pens and other products under review across the 700 pages of Selected Amazon Reviews are as diverse as the literary styles and critical techniques used to assess them.

Airport Planning & Management, ‘one of the best resources for the lay manager’, gets full marks: ‘Over five hundred pages, and I could detect only a few minor inaccuracies.’ The collection is shot through with this kind of fancy, fuelled by the wonder and absurdity of life in the Amazon age. (A review of Fresh Ideas in Dried Flowers opens with the admission that he’d used Prime too hastily: the intention was to buy Dried Ideas in Fresh Flowers.) Evaluation frequently morphs into more emotive modes. ‘We’re all looking for that time before our own births in which sin and death had not yet corrupted our innocence’, he explains upon revisiting the album Midnight Ride by Paul Revere & the Raiders. A book of ghost stories from San Francisco is ‘a misbegotten salmagundi, blending fact and fiction in a manner deleterious to them both’, while a five-star review of Lost and Found Pet Posters from Around the World describes ‘a postmodern assemblage with old-fashioned heart and soul’. The same could be said of Selected Amazon Reviews.

Killian wrote these reviews swiftly, ‘furiously trying to catch the voices that were moving through him’, in Bellamy’s telling. Yet when writing about literature, the register can be that of an exemplary reader with an expansive knowledge of his craft. On Leslie Scalapino’s Selected Poems, for instance: ‘We see also, spinning backward from the present, how her great prophetic voice, aligned with a sharply political jeremiad of shame and rebuke to present US-government policies, is not a new development in the work, that she has always been a poet of the social, of the political, of the word trembling in the hell of late capitalism.’ Elsewhere, Killian drifts into less professional moods. One amusing riff finds him wedging in nostalgic tales about a childhood in France (he grew up on Long Island). On Simon Liberati’s Anthology of Apparitions, for example:

As an American boy growing up in France, I knew many boys and girls like Claude and Marina, resourceful and gamin-like waifs who sullenly sold their bodies for a rind of cheese and a Gauloises, and who played aimlessly with needles – the hypodermic kind, the kind used at the millinery ateliers on the rue Sainte-Anne near the Palais-Royal, or the needle on the phonograph machine that, when applied to any of Françoise Hardy’s or the Rolling Stones’ numerous LPs, provided the yé-yé soundtrack to our lives. 

According to Killian, who spent most of his writing career working 9–5 as an executive secretary for Able Cleaning Services, the French-boy ploy may have festered out of his distaste for the literary elite flitting back and forth from Europe and writing poetry about it. ‘Maybe it was from a class perspective, but I thought that this was the worst’, he writes. He returns to the theme, hatchet in hand, during one of his rare negative reviews, of Shirley Hazzard’s ‘creamily’ written memoir of Graham Greene’s Italian isle: ‘All travel writing is sort of alike, and there are two sorts of readers, one who loves nothing better than a book about Capri and the other who would rather undergo a Brazilian body wax without anesthesia’. He nevertheless awards Greene on Capri three out of five stars: ‘pure opium’.

A sequential reader may notice thematic continuities across the Selected Amazon Reviews. For about a month in 2005, Killian only reviewed things with midnight in their title. First, films: Midnight Cowboy, Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil, Midnight Express, etc. Then music, a ‘Midnight Desert Young Style Car Seat’, and finally . . . cookies: ‘Key Lime Coolers in Special Edition Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Tin by Byrd Cookie Company’. The review opens in Savannah, with Killian doing the Baedeker in different voices: ‘you have to hand it to the locals, they have discovered the way to live.’ Most of what follows concerns visiting the Bonaventure Cemetery to see Sylvia Shaw Judson’s statue Bird Girl, whose likeness features on the cover of John Berendt’s novel Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil and in Clint Eastwood’s adaptation, which Killian had reviewed just a few days earlier:

Everywhere there were video cameras or cell phones turned on each other, trying to capture some action. A guard told us this was the most photographed statue in the world. He said it was not strictly speaking an angel, but a bird girl, but that indeed it had performed some miracles and that the types of people who used to go to Lourdes could now go to see the Bird Girl and pray to her, perhaps rub their bad limbs against the statue. . . This same guard offered us some delicious key lime cookies from a strangely familiar tin box. It turned out he had ordered this box from Byrd Cookie Company. It’s a handsome tin, capaciously filled with luscious Key Lime Coolers, and the selling point beyond the tasty treats is the exact replica of the famous statue! Thus, it looks just like the popular book which made bestseller history and turned Savannah from a backwater town to one of the most sought-after tourist cities in the USA. . . Buy this box and leave it on your divan or coffee table and your guests will be agog with wonder, maybe a better word would be curiosity.

Neither the tin nor its imagery is ‘an exact replica’ of the statue; the key lime cooler container does not look ‘just like’ Berendt’s novel. And Killian knows this – by calling Bird Girl ‘the most photographed statue in the world’ he summons the most cited instance of simulacra in postwar American literature: ‘the most photographed barn in America’ from Don DeLillo’s White Noise, described by the character Murray as ‘a religious experience in a way, like all tourism’. The ‘wonder’ and ‘curiosity’ once evoked by miracles at Lourdes are now the stuff of Savannah tourist brochures and cookie marketing copy. The numinous has been subsumed into the mystical character of the commodity, and can be yours, through this limited time offer, if you order soon!

While reading Selected Amazon Reviews, I remembered a moment from Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (2018), also published by Semiotext(e). The protagonist, who works as a seasonal labourer at an Amazon distribution centre in Leipzig-Nordost, contemplates quiet forms of sabotage: ‘sprinkle dust inside the books (only the bad books and the badly made ones), insert Post-its with insults directed at the product’s buyers’. For Killian as well, resistance to Amazon’s ecumenical consumer regime comes in sprinklings and overprintings, paratexts pasted onto digital landing pages for products, and though he targets buyers, too, his mode is rarely the invective, almost always the encomium, the gush. ‘He’s not interested in a simple fuck you to capitalism’, writes Bellamy in her afterward, ‘he queered capitalism like he queered everything else’; ‘he pursues reviewing as an act of love, not carnage: critique as caress’, thinks Koestenbaum. ‘He’s torquing the system from within’, Killian said of himself, quoting some unnamed critic. 

That slippage between grammatical person is echt Killian. ‘Ever been really drunk, in a room full of mirrors?’ asks the narrator of his short story ‘Spurt’ from Impossible Princess. ‘All of a sudden there’s a little click in your head, and the first person turns into the second person. That’s you – Kevin. Have another drink. Don’t mind if I do. You stroke the warm cock in your hand, can’t decide if it’s yours or another’s. Click. The second person slips in the third.’ One way to read these reviews would be as an evolution out of New Narrative, a movement which, as he and Bellamy explain, cultivated ‘ecstatic desire in the place of tortured ambivalence’. A violent erotic encounter opens onto capacious and intoxicated subjectivities in ‘Spurt’, a cock that’s mine, yours, his; the polyvocal ‘I’ of Selected Amazon Reviews appropriates, in turn, the multitudinous fantasies of selfhood that are reified in and reflected out of consumer products and cultural objects.

‘An ill-defined movement from the beginning’, write Bellamy and Killian in their New Narrative anthology Writers Who Love Too Much (2017). This loose avant-garde began in late 1970s San Francisco as a response to the Language school’s disembodied poetics. One of its founding practitioners, Robert Glück, described the Language school’s ‘poetry of disjunction as a luxurious idealism’, in which the speaking subject ‘disappears in the largest freedom, that of language itself’; yet ‘whole areas of my experience, especially gay experience, were not admitted to this utopia’. Forgoing the arcadia of abstraction, New Narrative writers bedded down in the rag-and-bone shop of messy life on earth, the porous borders of subjectivity, gossip, sex, autobiography, theory, pop and stuff. ‘Writing can’t will away power relations and commodity life’; instead, New Narrative sought to ‘explore its relation to power and recognize that group practice resides inside the commodity.’ (Killian seems to recall this group practice by inviting a chorus of commodity-adjacent personas into his critical voice.)

‘What we learned in New Narrative was that it didn’t really matter what you wanted to write, if that was a joke book or a series of wedding invitations it could also be a novel’, Killian told The Baffler in 2017. Before they were scraped from the internet, printed and bound, his reviews were site-specific, their primary audience the would-be consumer. For this reason, these texts are kin to a kind of guerilla poetry. And here, too, is a way that Killian ‘torqued’ the system from within. In Valuing the Unique, sociologist Lucien Karpik examines the ‘market of singularities’, which he believes governs goods and services that fall by the wayside of neoclassical economics due to their multivalent, incommensurable and uncertain qualities: novels, films, fine wine, medical doctors. To make their purchasing decisions, consumers of singularities rely upon multiple ‘judgement devices’: critical reviews, consumer guides, branding, marketing, promotion. Curiously, ‘the multiplicity of judgement criteria is not abnormal’, he notes, ‘but no system of production, no market, can tolerate an actor whose proliferating actualizations threaten to overwhelm the real possibilities of production and exchange.’ 

Amazon tolerated Killian – even naming him a ‘Top 100’ reviewer for a spell – but what must it have been like to stumble upon the proliferating actualizations of this poet’s voices, judgements, ludic flights? To be shopping for a DVD of Holiday (1938) and learn that Killian has installed ‘one of those newfangled “Herpburninators”’ on his TiVo’, which ‘censors every frame featuring Katharine of Arrogance? To browse NARS Comestics’s Multiple Orgasm Set II and find a reviewer lipglossing K-E-V-I-N across his forearm until it ‘tingle[s] with beauty’? An army of Killians couldn’t begin to overwhelm ‘the real possibilities of production and exchange’ on Amazon, nor is this literature’s task. And perhaps most of his initial readers merely blanked and clicked ‘buy’. Or smashed the thumbs-up button and browsed on. But maybe a few, just a few, lingered over this language, or even whispered to themselves: Who is this voice? And what am I/you/he doing here?

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Read on: Lola Seaton, ‘Good Mistakes’, NLR 146.