| Andrei Codrescu's controversial and notorious anti-literary literary magazine Exquisite Corpse has become a primary source for the non-brain-dead everywhere. Rebellion, passion and black humor are the journal's trademarks. In 1999 Black Sparrow published Volume One (limited to poetry and essays) of this two-volume anthology. This second volume completes the project with fictions, travels and translations. By expanding its audience, the first volume transformed the Corpse from its cult status as a privileged pleasure of the cognoscenti to a generally acclaimed repository of cultural and aesthetic libertarianism. Media critics around the country celebrated a delightful compilation of the dying century's last spasm of creative rage against the system. "Unplugged, unprogrammed, unleashed -- there's something here to provoke and delight everyone", declared Susan Larson (New Orleans Times-Picayne). "We need to hear these voices from the Corpse". More dark and light amusements calculated to assault, shock, intrigue and reflect our anxious millennium fill the pages of this second Corpse Reader. A heady invitation to enjoy one's intellectual freedom while it lasts, the volume inscribes central (and edgy) poetic controversies, eulogizes and condemns, realizes and surrealizes, translates and travels across space and time to place us in all those wild worlds visited by the bizarre legion of Corpse correspondents.
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Andrei Codrescu's literary magazine, Exquisite Corpse, existed in print for 15 years before going wholly online. This anthology selects essays, letters, and poems from across the career of the print journal, and includes 30 pages of the infamous "Body Bag" section in which the magazine's editors let loose on the poems they'd rejected for that issue.
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