2,000 years ago poets were banished from the Republic by Plato. Were a poet and philosopher to meet today, what would the poet say after all these years?
The resulting epistolary poems -- addressed to leading Western philosopher, Alain Badiou -- are at once a metaphor for the relationship between poetry and philosophy, a musing on the possibility of love in the modern age, and a challenge to the authority and absolutism of Western male philosophical practice.
Dear Alain is both "a psycho-sexual Lacanian thriller," according to psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster and an accredited representation of Badiou's work, using Badiou's four "conditions" on philosophy: love, politics, math and poetry. No matter how the work is framed, ultimately the story rests in "Katya's" agency, her self-liberation from the mirror, or prison, of his writing --- with her own writing, something like a long, inquisatory, subtle sext message.
Bohinc and Badiou performed a work based on Dear Alain in New York City in 2015. Watch "Poetry on Top". Hardcover and paperback editions are available here.
REVIEWS
"It really is possible to kill your philosophy daddies or at the very least confuse the hell out of them."
Sandra Simonds in Best American Poetry
"Eroticism, hints of masochism, philosophical argument included, this is a serious book that elicits and repays attentive reading."
-Donald Wellman in Immanent Occasions
"You have a talking to instead of at"
-Mat Laporte in Lemonhound
"Ecstasy over Atheism"
-Alana Siegel in Journal of Poetics Research
"Is that Žižek blurb real?"
-Maureen Thorson interviews Katy Bohinc in Open Letters Monthly