In the summer of 1995 Kathy Acker met and befriended the Australian writer McKenzie Wark. Over the year which followed they developed a sexual relationship and constantly exchanged email messages about the nature of identity. This correspondence makes up a fascinating serial dialogue, which gives us glimpses of Acker's reading and thinking shortly before her death from cancer in 1997. Wark approached Acker through the prism of her fiction, while Acker had read Wark's 1994 study of the global media, Virtual Geography. Wark, for instance, declares near the beginning of their correspondence, “the whole queerness/identity thing for me stretches through everything” (21). Both writers were concerned with borders and margins, in short with the whole fluid relation of masculine to feminine within the individual psyche and within society. Accordingly Acker acknowledges her debts to figures who subverted conventional gender roles, writers such as the American philosopher Alphonso Lingi or the Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek. Thanks to Andy Warhol, she declares at one point, “we were no longer freaks” (31), and she notes the media's fascination with the impending death of Timothy Leary. Above all, Acker records how Maurice Blanchot had played a key role in shaping her conception of literary language and moving her fiction farther away from realism.

Although Acker expressed anxiety that her emails might seem narcissistic, they actually show her heightened awareness of language. So, characteristically, she will make an assertion to Wark and then examine its implications. Even during their relationship, sexual acts formed part of a larger inquiry into the nature of physical control. This was clearly a demanding process for Acker, who expressed unease about her “homeless” state of mind and constantly finding herself on the “peripheries” (58). Part of this debate involved formulating attitudes to America, where some element of displacement was important to both writers. Thus Acker sees Australia as the “American-dream-come-true” (54), whereas she criticizes Wark for idealizing America. To her it represented “war and devastation”; even more bleakly, a “big black hole” (45). Both Acker and Wark engaged with the political nature of sexual identity and one of the most important moments in this correspondence comes when Acker uses Bataille and Blanchot to speculate on the nature of a community and how the self might relate to the Other. Here she combines Blanchot's The Unavowable Community with Judith Butler's theories of sexual identity as performance.

This correspondence comes with a valuable introduction by Matias Viegener, Acker's literary executor, and an afterword by the Australian writer John Kinsella. It will make a unique extension of Acker's nonfiction like Bodies of Work and will help to shed further light on her fiction.