Camp Marmalade

"Camp Marmalade affirms the crucial incompleteness that compels an artist to persist in experimentation. Beneath the cultivated glaze of an esthete is a hot mess of creativity, a hormonal jumpiness. The remembered children and burping infants in Camp Marmalade's dreamscapes give permission for poet and reader to begin again. Just where the memories end, in the present, new words are given fresh paint."--Christopher Wood "Full Stop"
"Koestenbaum, who is also a musician and a visual artist, is here sliding between different artistic media to find or forge a different, spontaneous gesture of motion, inhabiting his painter-self at times to draw upon and re-draw the orality of poetry into a haptic unveiling, a tactile action that insists upon--and requires--the repetition of strokes, the muscle memory of touch; so much like applying makeup; so much like self-presentation as an action-in-process with an indeterminate end. The point, or one of them, is to keep going."--Chris Campanioni "The Brooklyn Rail"
"Koestenbaum's reflexivity is uncanny and gathers pathos from the very task of writing, which for him is tantamount to assembling a self. As Foucault put it, being gay 'is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to define and develop a way of life.' This book presents a hallucinatory glimmer of what that life might be without granting precedence to any single method."--Felix Bernstein "Bookforum"