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The Nancy Reagan Collection
Poetry. Hybrid Genre. Performance Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. THE NANCY REAGAN COLLECTION is a response to growing up queer and trans under the rise of HIV-AIDS. Crossing genres and generations, this performance novel remixes the AIDS archive through an ever-spiraling politics and aesthetics of mourning. Alternating chapters offer up a narrative throughline composed of hallucinogenic episodes from the perspective of a nameless, grieving protagonist in the midst of the global carnage of the Reagan dynasty. Part revenge, part fantasy, the book experiments with poetic practices that challenge conceptions of memory and morality, activism and escapism, grief and beauty. "'What is there to say that you haven't not said already?' Maxe Crandall fills the Reagans' famous silence on AIDS with a dazzling fantasia on glamour, grief, testimony, fandom, and ferocious indignation. Crandall refracts the crimes of the eighties through the icons and cultural debris of that era-so many coldblooded ways for flesh, power, and image to meet in mass death. Global catastrophes ornament Nancy's reign of just saying no as the CIA runs crack to fund the Contras. She floats above, a ghoulish death's head, dead and life-like, the pole star of this performance novel. 'Nancy introduces hallucination at the viral spike.' Above all, THE NANCY REAGAN COLLECTION explores the meaning of the image in all dimensions, blunt and cryptic, 'the live self blinks behind the one represented.' Like Nancy, you will smile one of your political grins."-Robert Glück "'He looks like the future,' Maxe Crandall tells us. But what looks like the past? What can look at this never-ending past? This dark dream of a book is one answer. The Archive. Memory. Poets Theater. Elegy. Grief and rage undergirding high fashion; i.e., the world. Maxe conjures all of this, and conjures the conjuring. Time, genre, perspective-these things are unstable. That is, of limited (endless) use. Imagine a multiplayer video game-that is, a script. Pick a stage, any stage, and gather to you your closest enemies. The more harshly glittering the lights, the better. The past (which is to say the present and future) intervenes with increasing urgency. Your gloved hands will always and never touch."-Claudia La Rocco "The energy and the invention of this work are impressive. If you read it sympathetically, you will like it."-Samuel R. Delany "Maxe Crandall's THE NANCY REAGAN COLLECTION is a virtuosic experiment where the all too harrowing reality of the Reagan era and its discontents (AIDS, Iran-Contra, the beginning of the end of the progressive American dream) meets a phantasmagorical interlocution with its strangest protagonist-Nancy Reagan. Crandall hauntingly weaves poetry and historiography together alongside an index of our fallen ancestors to remind us of the bizarre ways that queer and trans people's lives are enmeshed in deadly intimacy with people whose politics and politesse kill us. I love this book."-Miguel Gutierrez
184 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 2, 2024
just finished this amazing book and i'm ready to start again. like several of my all time favorites, THE NANCY REAGAN COLLECTION teaches you how to read it as you go. by the time i was halfway through, i was better equipped to trace the connections between the narrative voices and the dichotomy of non-fiction and fantasy - i understood that hybrid, the place where this book lives, is the DNA that translates to trans, to poly, or many, as in voices, as in stories, as in interpretations.
i'm awkward talking about the book because that's how it goes when you read something that breaks all the rules, or isn't interested in rules, but interested in forging a new path - the case whenever a thing wants to be itself. coming into contact with new works is a rare thing. like the musicians i hold in high esteem, to sound like yourself is the greatest compliment i can offer. maxe crandall reads like maxe crandall and no other and that's a good thing.
this book is comprised of various narratives. they arrive in episodes. the episodes have at least three strands: 1) the strand of fantasy, narrated by a few voices: (i may get this wrong, but ...) michael jackson, janet jackson, julie andrews ...? i couldn't help imagining it this way; and maxe crandall. it seems that we, the readers, could also occupy the i of first person. 2) like the david foster wallace of INFINITE JEST, there is a long running series of footnotes, but these are arranged on the page with the narrative; they often provide a series of non-fiction facts about the people and events referred to in the fantasy - in particular, the reagans and their crimes against the state. 3) a listing of names - some you may recognize, some perhaps not - of people who died of AIDS, along with the date they left us.
the episodes range from light fantasy to to the horrors of the reagan administration's attack on central america, the fast-track prison industrial complex boom (and the black bodies that were imprisoned as part of the just say no campaign), and their long-standing campaign to ignore the AIDS crisis. the non-fiction aspects of the book track the things that have fueled deep ire and hatred of these people in my heart, but somehow, perhaps magically, crandall's book has offered a kind of healing for this reader. while i am still unable to forgive the reagans for the deep damage they did to our country, i no longer feel victimized by the history. i'm left dancing to the jacksons on their graves.
this all seems the stuff of miracles to me. and yet maxe crandall has put it all together in book of magic, a book of love, of humor, and a telling of an era that has been radically reset by the right wing who have done all they can to ensure that the 1% will hold the power base and that the folks who don't fit into "reagan's america" are dispensable.
if it isn't already clear, i just want to say in closing: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
i'm awkward talking about the book because that's how it goes when you read something that breaks all the rules, or isn't interested in rules, but interested in forging a new path - the case whenever a thing wants to be itself. coming into contact with new works is a rare thing. like the musicians i hold in high esteem, to sound like yourself is the greatest compliment i can offer. maxe crandall reads like maxe crandall and no other and that's a good thing.
this book is comprised of various narratives. they arrive in episodes. the episodes have at least three strands: 1) the strand of fantasy, narrated by a few voices: (i may get this wrong, but ...) michael jackson, janet jackson, julie andrews ...? i couldn't help imagining it this way; and maxe crandall. it seems that we, the readers, could also occupy the i of first person. 2) like the david foster wallace of INFINITE JEST, there is a long running series of footnotes, but these are arranged on the page with the narrative; they often provide a series of non-fiction facts about the people and events referred to in the fantasy - in particular, the reagans and their crimes against the state. 3) a listing of names - some you may recognize, some perhaps not - of people who died of AIDS, along with the date they left us.
the episodes range from light fantasy to to the horrors of the reagan administration's attack on central america, the fast-track prison industrial complex boom (and the black bodies that were imprisoned as part of the just say no campaign), and their long-standing campaign to ignore the AIDS crisis. the non-fiction aspects of the book track the things that have fueled deep ire and hatred of these people in my heart, but somehow, perhaps magically, crandall's book has offered a kind of healing for this reader. while i am still unable to forgive the reagans for the deep damage they did to our country, i no longer feel victimized by the history. i'm left dancing to the jacksons on their graves.
this all seems the stuff of miracles to me. and yet maxe crandall has put it all together in book of magic, a book of love, of humor, and a telling of an era that has been radically reset by the right wing who have done all they can to ensure that the 1% will hold the power base and that the folks who don't fit into "reagan's america" are dispensable.
if it isn't already clear, i just want to say in closing: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
July 4, 2021
Astute, sad, dignified, complex work- the narcissists in power literally trod on our lost geniuses underfoot on these pages. Visual, preservation, persevering, moving work by Maxe. Thank you.
January 9, 2023
I have to admit, reading the book, I thought the poet had lived through the AIDS Epidemic of the 1980s. And the Reagan Presidency. It's a testament to the quality of archival research, and how that research plays into the poems. And I'll admit that I'm a naturally gullible person. I'm easily lured into believing whatever the poem says, whatever the poem is doing, it's a truth. Let's embrace the truth! Is kind of a bodily response I have while reading.
And so, yes. I'll admit. In Crandall's poem "Just Say AIDS," I believed the poet and Nancy Reagan were having movie nights together while Nancy was in the White House. I was like, Wow. Nancy's got some issues with Daryl Hannah and femininity if this is her reaction to the movie Splash. Of course, this poem is more about how poetry could "tell Nancy's story" in the tone of a friend, a friend who would have had a complicated friendship with Nancy. Because Nancy was bigoted in that 1980s way--a way that was horrendous, but that was disturbingly accepted as "just the way they are." Or however you're supposed to describe the avoidance White Americans take when they're around obviously racist people.
And though I would argue this book is mainly concerned with the clash when Nancy Reagan's social life with Marlon Brando and Michael Jackson is juxtaposed with the stance her and her husband had against homosexuality, especially how that stance was enacted as policies against AIDS, there is a timely statement about how forgiving people became of Reagan after Trump came into office. They were both horrible. And it's likely that Reagan was worst.
There is also this fascinating take on celebrity and how Nancy Reagan might awkwardly fit into that culture. Perhaps there will be a Susan Sontag type essay pointing out how Nancy Reagan is the origin of cringe culture. And Crandall's book could be used as one of the primary sources!
And so, yes. I'll admit. In Crandall's poem "Just Say AIDS," I believed the poet and Nancy Reagan were having movie nights together while Nancy was in the White House. I was like, Wow. Nancy's got some issues with Daryl Hannah and femininity if this is her reaction to the movie Splash. Of course, this poem is more about how poetry could "tell Nancy's story" in the tone of a friend, a friend who would have had a complicated friendship with Nancy. Because Nancy was bigoted in that 1980s way--a way that was horrendous, but that was disturbingly accepted as "just the way they are." Or however you're supposed to describe the avoidance White Americans take when they're around obviously racist people.
And though I would argue this book is mainly concerned with the clash when Nancy Reagan's social life with Marlon Brando and Michael Jackson is juxtaposed with the stance her and her husband had against homosexuality, especially how that stance was enacted as policies against AIDS, there is a timely statement about how forgiving people became of Reagan after Trump came into office. They were both horrible. And it's likely that Reagan was worst.
There is also this fascinating take on celebrity and how Nancy Reagan might awkwardly fit into that culture. Perhaps there will be a Susan Sontag type essay pointing out how Nancy Reagan is the origin of cringe culture. And Crandall's book could be used as one of the primary sources!
February 16, 2021
Stayed up all night reading this. Prescient, heartbreaking, funny. It's a pedagogical account that instructs you how to build in the empty spaces of the Reagan silence to mass American death. Is the poets job to comfort, invent or report on the incomprehensibly traumatic and unwieldy indifference to this crisis? Questions still not answered in 2021 when the cultural reaction to mass death and indifference from Trump has been, conspiracy and despair.
January 11, 2024
A scathing, fantastical insight into the Reagan administration (Nancy included) and the negative impacts America still sees today from their regime. Beautiful prose, scattered with historical footnotes, and most importantly, dedicated to those who have lost their lives to AIDS as a both an indirect and direct consequence of the Reagan family. Crandall does a fantastic job of honoring these lives through reminding the reader of a death almost every page. Definitely a must read!
November 21, 2021
A fever dream autopsy but you get to stab the body a bunch and also the soul
What a brilliant bonfire for a wretched human
What a brilliant bonfire for a wretched human
December 29, 2021
Love love love - this book is brilliant and challenging - fresh, wildly funny, emotionally devastating, high camp as political memorial. Hats off.
October 15, 2023
Stunningggg
March 20, 2024
I read this for a college class, and I liked it. Very interesting and original style, watched a really good documentary to pair with it. Would definitely check out “voices from the front” as well!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews