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      Copyright © 1978 by Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus

      Cover design by Becca Fox Design

      Cover photograph © Michel Delsol

      Introduction Copyright © 2017 by Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

      CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Nice Fish is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

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      ANNIVERSARY EDITION

       Published simultaneously in Canada

       Printed in the United States of America

      First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: September 1984

      This Grove Atlantic edition: November 2017

      ISBN 978-0-8021-2762-4

      eISBN 978-0-8021-4655-7

      Grove Press

      an imprint of Grove Atlantic

      154 West 14th Street

      New York, NY 10011

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

       groveatlantic.com

      17 18 19 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

       Contents

Introduction by Chris Kraus

       Inside high school

       Parents stink

       The Scorpions

       Outside high school

       How spring came to the land of snow and icicles

       Janey becomes a woman

       The mysterious Mr Linker

       A book report

       Translating

       Cancer

       A journey to the end of the night

       Tangier

       In Egypt, the end

       A second of time

       So the doves

       The Journey

       The World

Introduction

      Kathy Acker was the most intentional of writers, but paradoxically, while Blood and Guts propelled her mid-1980s commercial breakthrough, it was her least intended work. She composed Blood and Guts in fragments, in her notebooks and as drawings, over five years that began when she was twenty-six years old and living with the composer Peter Gordon in Solana Beach in 1973. Solana Beach was a sleepy California beach town fourteen miles north of UC San Diego in La Jolla. She’d fled New York for California after meeting Gordon on a cross-country ride share road trip in the summer of 1972. It was there, while happily ensconced in Gordon’s two-bedroom upstairs bungalow apartment near the beach, that she composed the dream maps placed among the fairy tales in the chapter titled “How spring came to the land of snow and icicles.” The fairy tales themselves were written three years later, while she and Gordon were living on E. 5th Street in New York.

      Dreams cause the vision world to break loose our consciousness, Acker writes in Blood and Guts. And also: Dear dreams, you are the only thing that matter. She’d known, since beginning her long, self-willed apprenticeship as a writer when she was twenty-three years old, that dreams, and their disorder, would be central to her writing process. Working on her first serial novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, in Solana Beach in 1973, she attempted to regain a childhood consciousness, pushing herself towards a point of self-dissolution through sex and hallucinogenic drugs. The dream maps, which weren’t published in that book, record her dream-time forays across regions with names like The Plains, The Village, and The Childhood Land, where she discovers lions, wolves, trees, huts, and streets. “My mom,” Gordon recalls, “was a psychologist, and found them fascinating. Kathy gave her a large drawing that my mom had framed. Later, Kathy took the maps back, to include in Blood and Guts.”

      Blood and Guts opens with a hilarious, hyperbolized transcription of the tormented break-up conversations between the protagonist Janey Smith and a Father who she regards as her “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement and father.” These pages—the last to be composed—were written in the wake of her and Gordon’s separation in September 1978: “Mr. Smith was trying to get rid of Janey so he could spend all his time with Sally, a twenty-one year old

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