Reviewed by Antonia Cassetta
Drew Pisarra’s latest poetry collection, Fassbinder, is a professed fan letter to the films of the eponymous Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Pisarra plays on the friction of author and audience, on perceiving and being perceived, on god and man; the lines between these dichotomies are smeared as Pisarra takes the position of both. Pisarra immediately frames himself as the audience of R.W. Fassbinder and becomes distressed as he steps into the role of author and the paradigm melts away until he finally vows to follow the steps of R.W. Fassbinder. Crucially, Piarra’s distress is deemed useless as the fan letter is addressed to someone who will never read it, purposefully ignoring that it is being presented to the audience of readers. In a word, this collection is deeply agnostic.
Ideas of meaning and meaninglessness are illustrated through the rambling flows of consciousness, the ‘palimpsest’ of R.W. Fassbiner’s works, and the battling of conflicting ideas. Pisarra further entangles this in his own image of self through the ‘erotics of self-loathing’, toying with the motivations of his writings and perversely musing the importance (or, more aptly, unimportance) of them. He scrutinises being overly-self-aware as equaling indulgence and remains frustrated with this in a way that is deeply relatable to the audience as authors themselves.
Pisarra’s masterful ability to entwine his ideas tightly makes Fassbinder a provocative, honest, and ultimately human expression of the lecherous pull of self-hatred and the internal conflict that follows.