Burn Book

Reviews / Votes

"Bernstein's debut collection unfurls as an amalgamation of forms that . . . entrances with layered emotion."-- "Publishers Weekly"

"It's not Burn *This* Book, a demand for self-consuming aesthetics, but Burn Book, a book performing burns: not suicidal fires but a stream of abrasions on what represents life rather than being it. Bernstein risks the presence that comes from flinging writing into many impossible and agitated scenes. A frottage aesthetics trying to bring life back to life."--Lauren Berlant "Publishers Weekly"

"Private thought, critique, and personal narrative reside within a hyper-fabricated structure that results in a drama felt burn by burn. Antonin Artaud once defined poetry as "a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships." Burn Book comprises a series of burns that situate themselves in a realm of delighted destruction. More subtly, burning represents an intensity, an all consuming force that both brightens and annihilates. As much as Bernstein symbolically burns others, each with a dedicated section in the book, he also burns representations of himself, memory, representations of art and poetry, and representations of success."--Kalliopi Mathios "Queen Mobs"

"Felix Bernstein is a burn out, a mean girl, a silly fag, and an old hag. He is also burnt-out, for the rest of us have clearly sold out while fantasizing about punishment or transgression, victory or victimization. There isn't even the smallest morsel of satisfaction on offer . . . at least not to Felix Bernstein. It's all masturbation. Maybe, exhausted, spent, a whisper can emerge. It is okay to be weary. We are all case studies in a zoo full of breakdown speech. We are all self-immolating in hipster rubble." (Jamieson Webster)

"To blurb Burn Book is to participate cheerfully in Felix Bernstein's performance of willed stardom; to blurb is to enter his porn-phantasmagoria, his intellectual fugue-state, in a way that both disturbs and delights me. Burn Book-too incandescent for repose-is all genius, all chutzpah, all tragicomedy, all theory, all affront, all career, all elegy, all gift. He lives up to Artaud's exalted, punishing standard of flame. It's impossible for me not to be troubled and mesmerized by this book's poignant quest for authenticity via hyper-professionally embodied disembodiment." (Wayne Koestenbaum)