Experience in the Medium of Destruction - Softcover

Literary Nonfiction. LGBT Studies. The anti-heroism of Sara Jane Stoner's EXPERIENCE IN THE MEDIUM OF DESTRUCTION is a kind of queer-critical atomization—an expression of desire for a practice and a pedagogy toward an auto- necromancy of our own nuclear dust. A book harboring a raucous community of questions, enormous and tiny, personal and political, dense and light and hard and soft, questions as numerous as bodies: what boundaries serve both self and world in motion? what do we sacrifice in self production, in legibility? what utterances raise the stakes of the present and show us to our senses? what do we need from language in order to broaden our shared understanding of the overlapping fields of our relation? how can a poetics act toward consciousness?

Born and raised in Colorado, Sara Jane Stoner is a writer and teacher living in Brooklyn who holds an MFA from Indiana University and is pursuing a PhD in English at CUNY Graduate Center with a focus on critical pedagogy and queer theory, particularly in the context of contemporary experimental writing. She has taught writing and literature at Brooklyn and Baruch Colleges, as well as The Cooper Union, where she has also worked in the Writing Center for almost a decade, in addition to teaching classes on queer theory, Gertrude Stein, and "radical" education. Presently, she serves as the Reviews Editor for The Poetry Project Newsletter, works on her dissertation, and continues to boldly, speculatively hire people to work at the unaccredited free college she will help found in the not-so-distant future.