Proxies: Essays Near KnowingPast compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty four single subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics Foot Washing, Dossiers, Brer Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenusthat begin to unpack the essayist himself and his lifes rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working class, Primitive Baptist, central

he observes a destructive culture of celebrity surveillance and a country whose decline is embodied by the devastating downturn of its former golden child

In the final part of her essay Stewart examines the ways in which the "souvenir" and the "collection" are objects mediating experience in time and space

even when its hideous atrocity is

Title stamped in silver to spine

where he interviews anti-fracking activists

as a result of government directives

whatever planet that ladder might be on

The Americans remains as powerful and provocative as it was upon publication and continues to resonate with audiences today

But the story of where that money came from is not so pretty

as time collapses on itself and characters stranded in past eras search desperately for the elusive

Their identification of “pathetic” as ripe for reinvention forms the need for this anthology

and eventually