For years I knew him only as the biographer of the ingenious Jack Spicer, the enigmatic poet who penned the following sentence, never to be erased from my memory: “if it were spelled ‘mune’ it would not cause madness”. But Kevin Killian was much more, lauded by those who knew his work as an experimental writer, playwright – and probably the most important Amazon reviewer of all time. Published posthumously in November 2024, Selected Amazon Reviews is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read recently. Seven hundred pages float by effortlessly and in a state of utter delight – and not necessarily chronologically; as soon as you’ve opened the book randomly and read a review, you’ll instantly need the next fortuitous fix, a little like with Cortázar’s Hopscotch.

The title is not some kind of postmodern whim; the book really is a collection of a large part of Killian’s customer reviews on the world’s biggest website, written over a fifteen-year period (from 2004 to his death in 2019). Many of them deal with literature and film, no doubt due to his personal tastes, but his alert mind also homes in on several household and consumer items. There are a conspicuous number of five-star reviews. Killian was not one for surly elitist rejection, as the book makes clear. Almost everything is at least illuminated in detail, even obvious trash where genuine benevolent attention is impossible.

The balance of this “selection” is one of its most satisfying elements. Sincere critical praise and appraisal alternates every ten or fifteen pages with reviews of things far removed from art. If the painkillers, cleaning materials and wheeled suitcases were in the majority, the glamour of Killian’s wise literary and film criticism would rub off less gloriously on their reviews; and vice versa, fewer miniature essays on high culture would make the exceptions seem insincere and ridiculous. But in this composition, we get what looks like an uncontrived overview, l’homme entier and his view of life, extended to a wide range of products.

In Killian’s reviews of the avant-garde poets he genuinely admires, such as Amy Gerstler and Eileen Myles, we encounter mental depth paired with disarmingly magnanimous lines of thought, such as one about an anthology with what initially seems a questionable selection criterion of “poets who died of AIDS” (which then also includes a number of poets who died by suicide). Then we suddenly come across accolades for what the author considers the best part of Wes Craven’s horror franchise Scream; it’s hard to judge whether his praise may or may not be slightly ironic.

Killian frequently adopts a certain persona, and the “my wife” – one of the book’s repeated refrains – quoted at the end of the Scream review can suddenly be read in two different ways. Either as fictional; that is, the queer Kevin Killian is speaking here as a straight parody persona. Or is his real wife meant here, the queer writer Dodie Bellamy? It’s never quite clear, and that’s the delightful thing about it. We can hear the categorical gears crunching as we read, always a healthy experience.

Poets, Pills & Pushpins

Even where I might contradict Killian’s critical judgement – such as in his rather bored review of James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover (in my view the most significant verse epos in all of the English language, and you’re a donkey if you disagree!) – his prose entertains and instructs on every page, immersing us for instance, high on his language, in the attention and joie de penser, unimaginable in everyday life, of his testimonial on Advil Tablets (ibuprofen, 200 mg, 300 tablets). Did the “work accident” he describes, in which a gigantic crate of paper fell from a great height onto the writer’s foot, really happen? Who cares – either way, the tablets are now encased in a super-sized PEZ dispenser in the shape of San Francisco Giants baseball player Tim Lincecum, in pride of place on the reviewer’s desk.

It’s these meditations on non-literary products that encourage Killian’s most unusual stylistic flights of fancy. Let’s look at this wonderful paragraph from his review of Breast Cancer Awareness Pushpins, for example:

“At morning, spill out the jar of Officemate Pushpins across your blotter in the morning sunlight. You’ll see a soothing, almost angelic pink on their tips, as friendly as a dog’s tongue licking your face. At noon, under the white-hot sun, spill them again, the pink nearly disappears, almost burnt off by the summer heat. You’ll think you’re looking at little white dots of loose-leaf clipped from a pad of white paper, instead of the backs of sharp pins. Seeing them pushed into corkboards, you wonder, ‘How’d that pink get so pallid?’ like an old formal your former wife wore to her high school prom and for some unaccountable reason kept hung and wrapped on the back of her closet door for years. Miss Havisham, anybody?”

Or here, the beautifully companionable narrative tone with which his review of Mattel’s 2002 Holiday Celebration Barbie kicks in:

“I remember the disaster of Holiday Celebration Barbie 2001 and I bet you do too, people just couldn’t get used to the sight of Barbie as an Austrian ice queen with fair, nearly colorless hair spread out from her face like the feeble rays of a setting sun.”

There follows a precise description of the pros and cons of this new Barbie edition in a similar tone, ending with acclaim for the far improved packaging. But: “One girl I know actually took hers out of the box to look at it, but we don’t speak to her any more. I mean, really!” Again, we’re not reading a fully formed fictitious persona here, but we do hear at least a slight leaning into a possible alternative version of Kevin Killian as, let’s say, a young girl or part of a girls’ clique.

Only rarely does the strictly chronological order of the pieces produce unintended negative or confusing effects. Instantly converted by Killian’s enthusiasm in a review of Naomi Replansky’s Collected Poems, the work of a poet died only two years ago at the age of 104, whom I had never previously heard of (and even more impressed by a few lines quoted in the review), I had to interrupt my reading to order the book on Amazon. I then went on to the next review, full of anticipation, only to read the heading German Potato Salad Can (15 oz., pack of 12) and to think for the first time: Oh, come on! They could at least have inserted a few – hmm, what word was I looking for? Gradations? Yes, gradations! – between the pieces. It wouldn’t have done any harm.

And yes, it does seem pretty odd in general to award an equal five stars to such a choice work of poetry and to a twelve-pack of potato salad. Then again, Amazon forces us to enter some kind of star rating, otherwise the review won’t upload. The limitation is on Amazon’s side, that is, not on the part of the writer Kevin Killian.

Reviews on a Bus Seat (★★★★★)

After several hundred pages, I first began to ask myself a question which must have been on the minds of this article’s readers for some time now: Why Amazon? Why did Kevin Killian donate his wisdom, his remarkable insights, the spectacular wealth of his knowledge and his chameleonic way of writing so tirelessly to this site in particular?

Even on the book cover, in the enthusiastic endorsements, his project is compared to “poems on bus seats” and even referred to explicitly as “disposable”. Writing Amazon reviews is, as most would admit, primarily a pretty good way to conceal your own work from a wider audience. (An analogue objection is often voiced to the “Twitter poetry” I recently celebrated in a small monograph. Why deposit the most wonderful poetry on a website where it is constantly shouted down by argumentative chatter and uninspired nonsense?)

To better address this question, we need do nothing more than look at what we’re dealing with at Amazon (or indeed Twitter/X). In the late-1990s, the internet was still experienced horizontally, journey-like. We’d click from one website to the next, logically stumbling into increasingly strange corners, constantly encountering ourselves in various demonic disguises, hanging out for a while in chat spheres, and in the end, we’d build ourselves miniature short-term habitats. In mythological terms, this phase corresponds to what in the literature is sometimes called the age of demons. A personalised, chaotic encounter with the supernatural.

These days, however, we are in the age of gods that always follows, where everything is ordered along strictly vertical and feudal lines. We live almost exclusively on a handful of sites, and these sites study and know us in our entirely, train us into this or that behaviour, and so on. In the digital age of demons there was little point hiding hundreds of reviews in some dark corner. No dignified anarchic gesture resided as yet in making oneself invisible. But here, facing off with Amazon, the act of infiltration, of making oneself invisible, creates a genuinely subversive position of power. Where others only ever write in exchange for money or acknowledgement, these pieces come about, we may assume, to plant green life into this barely inhabitable world, without permission or penalty. Not unlike the puzzle haikus and satirical poems smuggled into ironically intended micropayments to the FBI some time ago in the Bitcoin blockchain, which no power in the world can erase from the system.

In his 1993 book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam described the phenomenon of more and more Americans doing just that. Who were they competing against? Against their own previous high-scores, but no longer against other people. In the decades since, this pattern of isolation, often twinned with optimisation mania, has, as everyone knows, expanded to all areas of our lives. Book and record stores where we once met people became Amazon, taxis became Uber, journalism became posts and takes.

And then came Temu, only three years ago, and Amazon warped under the pressure of having to be more and more like its new rival; now the two are practically indistinguishable. Posts and takes, these days, have become unreadable AI junk, listicles and so on. The bad versions of a certain experience have been replaced by bad imitations of bad versions. Trips to the cinema became Netflix, and now Netflix has become the new Netflix, countless movies with identical ostinato piano scores and a random social issue, the kind previously produced straight-to-video at most, perhaps shown at five in the morning on the Bavarian private TV station Tele 5.

The media history word for it is slop. In the major platforms’ techno-feudalism, the aim is no longer to generate goods or information for mass distribution, but merely to create a constant dissatisfaction that remains loyal to the product. The slop experience leaves human beholders or users unfulfilled, taken for a ride, “still hungry”; but instead of turning away from that disappointment in a completely new direction, we see no other option than traipsing along the one-way street forever. The major platforms have no problem with almost all our everyday experiences becoming ever more absurd and depressing, as long as we keep having those experiences exclusively on them. As it turns out, the sentiment this creates, of remaining dissatisfied but unshakeably loyal, is a far stronger purchase driver than all the meanwhile outdated loyal customer feelings such as enthusiasm or fandom or recommendation.

We can bemoan this development, resign to it. That’s what most people do, myself included. We can turn away from all of it, perhaps throw away our telephones. A few people have done, with negligible impact. Or we can take a third path: that of replanting our deforested world of experience, a futile exercise but one performed with brio and obsession. Kevin Killian is one of the most noble examples of this latter option. The most soulless wastelands of our experience deserve to be relentlessly plastered with unexpected depth, inappropriate sincerity and undeserved poetry. Flood the zone with life.