Will I love Skin?

Kathe Koja does queer writing in ways that give me goosebumps. This revamp of her queer body classic is vibrant decades after its first irruption. Skin ballets in with motion and sound, kinetic and manic, cascading to fever pitch in a volatile way. Each page is white hot and fluid, ductile and distorting, as text forms/deforms to a fierce sense of dark metal energy. Koja is performative in this creative novel, dramatic in a continuous chorus of scaffolds and butcher blocks, vibrant in an alloy that’s a psychedelic orchestra. Skin is cinematic with a deep sense of place whose characters… show more.

Like its classic predecessor, The Cipher, Kathe Koja’s second novel brilliantly navigates artistic and romantic movements between the somatic and the transcendent, the erotic and the morbid, and ultimately between creativity and destruction. The book centers on metal sculptor Tess’s burgeoning relationship with Bibi, a transgressive performance artist whose radical visions aspire to an extreme embodiment of posthuman aesthetics.

Incorporating Tess’s metal sculptures into her performances, Bibi explores increasingly intense modes of expression through self-mutilation, cutting, and scarification, and the book plunges fearlessly into the parallel arcs of an eroding love and an increasingly deadly obsession. Koja’s prose bristles… show more.