The Fassbinder Diaries

The gauze of James Pate’s nightmare, critical & cinematic beauty keeps rising & falling on a “crimson couch,” “a scarlet curtain” & a “crisp red light”—like Homer’s rosy-fingered dawn. & like Homer the language is measured, simple & deliberate. Noble. But detonates in “torturous rampaging music”—in the “the lemon of the pig. The glory and run-off of the pig.” The nightmare is inside. & the nightmare is outside. & the critic is a man. & the critic is a woman. & the Fassbinder film just keeps on playing—“in a haze of pink dust.”

–Rauan Klassnik, author of The Moon’s Jaw

Raised in the urban ruins of Memphis Tennessee, in the wake of riots and assassinations, James Pate’s fantasies and visions draws on the occult atmosphere of devil-blues, underground trash and gothic pageantry. His work inhabits a saturated zone of violence and artifice, hate and love. For the past 15 years he has been one of my favorite writers and closest collaborators.

–Johannes Goransson, author of Haute Surveillance

James Pate draws the veins together with this pulpy ode to Fassbinder. It’s burnt with shades of Klassnik & Kitchell, Evenson & Glenum, but it’s also its own night raid—these poems read like the transcript of a documentary about two sexless artists as they run loops of long-dead film stock through a haunted Arriflex, dying to record blood-slicked mannequins lit by meat locker fluorescents. Pate gets it.

–Ken Baumann, author of Solip