Kevin Killian’s user experience

There is something inherently ridiculous about Kevin Killian’s posthumously published Selected Amazon Reviews. The book takes great pains to show it is very aware of this and to make sure the reader is just as aware. It is evident right there on its cover, puckishly aping the Library of America’s canonical majesty. It continues beneath it, with Wayne Koestenbaum, that doyen of highbrow poptimists, and Dodie Bellamy, an author and Killian’s wife, giving well-theorized answers as to why. Why spend the last 15 years of one’s life, as Killian did, reviewing anything and everything on Amazon? Why publish a fraction of them in book form, let alone in the fine-china quality of Semiotext(e)? Why read them at all?