a day in the life of p. by kari edwards

Sooner or later it seemed people would need to start writing in groups. It seems like the people who died in the World Trade Center must have died for someone and shouldn’t everyone write a book for them. And what about me? Shouldn’t everyone write a book for me. Who would write a book for all the women, or all the men. The queers. How about all the people who died in the holocaust. What about all the people who didn’t. What about the people working in the buildings not next, but not far from the world trade center. Or in other cities. Why doesn’t everybody write a book for them? And who would be its author. kari edwards comes up & down like a cloud writing a sneering exuberant millennial book, speaking for the army of us who know something else, but don’t know how to say or do. kari edwards’ a day in the life of p. is a total fucking masterpiece. She’s a monk postmodernist, kari writes in groups. People should start chanting this book on street corners. I can’t stop reading it, it’s screamingly grey, its better than phone sex, than Burroughs or proust, it’s outrageously cool.

—Eileen Myles

 

Burroughsian, transgressive, exceedingly sharp and witty, kari edwards has launched a startling and entertaining first novel. The “p” of the title is a visionary, agitator, bemused thinker, voyeur as well as the penultimate protagonist afloat in a world of mixed signs, genders, language, politics, irony. What’s solid? This picaresque book is the dislocated yet substantive narration of the future.

—Anne Waldman

 

To say kari edwards is a gifted, whip smart, tremendously inventive writer isn’t enough. a day in the Life of p. is much more than just a uniquely graceful and thrilling novel; it reimagines what it means to be an author from the soul outwards. This is an event.

—Dennis Cooper

 

edward’s book is side-splittingly funny, when it wants to be, and tragic and mystic in turns from page to page. Like Marcel Duchamp’s Rrose Selavy, “p” gives a new twist to our received ideas of heroism, kindness and lucidity.

—Kevin Killian

 

a day in the life of p is a dizzying non-stop read that rakes the reader through an urban world at once timeless yet contemporary, poetic yet rough hewn. There are enough possible impossibilities and impossibly coexisting opposites at work in this book that the read itself is both titillating and highly spiritual. Three cheers for kari edwards, the 21st century successor to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and William S. Burroughs.

— Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw