Acker tee

Kathy Acker (1947-1997) was a novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright whose work is closely associated with punk rock and experimental aesthetics. Raised in New York, she broke ties with her family in her twenties and worked as a stripper, while writing and publishing with the underground literary scene.

She burst into the mainstream with Blood and Guts in High School, which caused a sensation upon publication in 1987 - the book was banned in several countries. Her other major novels include Great Expectations, Don Quixote and Pussy, King of the Pirates, among others. A collection of her emails with McKenzie Wark was published in 2015, titled I'm Very into You.

Kathy Acker’s impact as a writer and performer, a cultural figure, and an ­(often overlooked) academic is uniquely ­tangled: the innovations of her hybrid, transgressive literature, written between 1972 and 1996, ­baffled her contemporaries to a degree that, once they had cracked the code, it was easily written off as yesterday’s avant-garde. And yet her work, and her flamboyant punk persona, proved to be disruptive at a time when disruption didn’t signal an anti-truth nihilism but a quest to subvert consciousness and challenge the rigidity of meaning, as she herself once put it. Her use of collage and appropriation raised questions that echo through today’s cultural landscape with striking urgency.

After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996, she abandoned Western medicine after a traumatic experience of surgery to treat the cancer, which was unsuccessful. She died in an alternative treatment centre in Tijuana, Mexico in 1997.

• 100% combed and ring-spun cotton (Heather colors contain polyester)
• Fabric weight: 4.2 oz/yd² (142 g/m²)
• Pre-shrunk fabric
• Side-seamed construction
• Shoulder-to-shoulder taping
• Blank product sourced from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, or the US

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