Kenneth Goldsmith’s Recent Works on Paper is the first critical book devoted to Kenneth Goldsmith, the acclaimed conceptual poet, pedagogue, and provocateur. The book’s focus is on Capital, Wasting Time on the Internet, Against Translation, and Theory, all published after Goldsmith’s controversial reading of a poem based on the Michael Brown autopsy report at Brown University in March 2015. These four books address issues of historiography, translation, pedagogy, authorship, and celebrity culture. Each book serves a retrospective function for an author who is, mid-career, taking stock of his considerable impact on U.S. (and world) poetics at the very moment when critics are challenging the ethics of his aesthetic judgement in the wake of the controversy surrounding The Body of Michael Brown. The author focuses on how Goldsmith stages (and, in some cases, transforms) his metamorphic identity as a post-humanist information manager.
His performance in these four books contests the current image of him among many critics and fellow poets as one of Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables who displayed extremely poor judgement while contributing to a culture of racial insensitivity by performing The Body of Michael Brown.