The Art of Writing an Amazon Review

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 245, ‘Wordplay’

As a child in the 1990s, I had no sense which genres were best suited to ‘becoming a writer’ – just one among the crazes that have long seduced our daughters – so I decided to contribute, gratis, to a website aggregating reviews of consumer products. My short essays on the latest volumes in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ (1983–2015) and Robert Jordan’s ‘Wheel of Time’ (1990– ongoing) series had few readers, but I remember being encouraged by the reception of my 700-word review of Friskies Come ’N Get It dry cat food. Titled ‘Limping Towards the Food Dish’, the review centred around an image of my dog, Jenny – otherwise slowed down by two old injuries, including a BB-gunshot wound inflicted by a neighbour who resented her barking – running to beat the cats to their dinner, unworried about the grease that its high-protein content would add to her canine coat.

Years later, it was this unrecommendable habit of writing reviews that introduced me to Kevin Killian: we found that we had both written lovingly of the artist Anne Collier, and we needed to have lunch about it. A San Francisco-based writer of gay novels, plays, stories, poems and more than 3,000 Amazon reviews – the latter entering him into the evil corporation’s ‘Hall of Fame’ – Killian took every opportunity to tell a good story. In his essay on Collier’s Still Lifes (2014), he takes the artist’s use of a particularly bright white as an occasion to consider, among other subjects, the CIA, ‘the altar cloths on which Salome presented the soppy head of Iokanaan’, the double bed in Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (1991), a theory of perpetually deferred masculinity and the civil rights movement.

Killian’s Amazon reviews, a project he started as a cure for writer’s block brought on by his 2003 heart attack, are similarly capacious. In some, a series of fictional characters named ‘Kevin Killian’ evaluate products their author never used, sharing their byline with relatively earnest critical appraisals of books of poetry. In a four-star review of a 12-colour set of Pilot pens, Killian writes from the perspective of ‘an American boy growing up in France’, generating from the pen’s plastic encasements an arch image of a teenager whose pétanque game was too rough for Montblancs. This young expat is a recurring character – one he describes in a 2017 interview with Cam Scott, published in Kevin Killian: Selected Amazon Reviews, Volume 4, as a mockery of the kind of ‘travel poetry’ common to writers who can afford to fly back and forth to France; Killian implies that trips to Paris are worse for a poet’s senses than the generation of free content for a multinational company. To date, the reviews have only appeared in selected volumes that necessarily sacrifice the sublimity of the project’s scale. This autumn, however, Semiotext(e) will release a 664-page version (albeit still a selection) with framing essays from Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy.

‘The answer to deep grief ’, Killian’s review of a 17-millilitre bottle of MacKenzies Smelling Salts, which poet Violet Spurlock tells me ‘everyone is obsessed with in the Bay’, invents a man who collapsed after ‘having been passed over for inclusion in the 2014 Whitney Biennial by a troika of careless curators’. He is revived by the help of his dutiful wife, who took a minute or two to locate the MacKenzies, but passing it under my nose, as though she were my grandfather ministering to the pregnant girls of yore, or the sore-bottomed ‘tough guys’; and suddenly I snorted and came awake, shot to my feet, still grieving for my disappointment but at least able to function and go back to making my art, feeding the cats, etc., being a man. In time of deep mourning thank goodness for small miracles!

If you didn’t get to know Kevin yourself, I invite you to pretend otherwise. Tell everyone he took a photograph of your ass under the flattering light of a San Francisco afternoon. You’d be operating under the logic of many of his reviews, working backward to the birth of a character from the desideratum of the moment of writing.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 245 with the headline ‘Degenerate Stars’

Kevin Killian’s ‘Selected Amazon Reviews’ will be published by Semiotext(e) on 19 November

^{Main image: Kota Ezawa, Video 97 (detail), 1997, film still. © Kota Ezawa. Courtesy: RYAN LEE Gallery, New York}