"Close Writing brings together two women writers close with, and close to, New Yorks Downtown art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Kathy Acker (1947-1997) and Cookie Mueller (1949-1989). While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death, the actress and writer Mueller-who performed in some of John Waters most famous films-has remained relatively obscure. Across queer feminist theory, archival research, and an experimental, autotheoretical writing practice of embodied encounter, Alice Butler contributes an original feminist methodology of epistolary writing and love (which she terms close writing) to touch, revitalize, and critically attend to the queer feminist politics and reparative transgressions of Acker and Muellers intimate lives in and as writing. Energized by the speculative, affective, and reparative powers of close writing as a creative-critical method which centers the love letter form, the book uncovers and reimagines points of contact, synchronicity, and dialogue between its two beloved subjects and correspondents, before and after and beyond their deaths from life-limiting disease (Mueller from AIDS-related complications; Acker from cancer). Close Writing contributes a cross-historical correspondence with Acker and Muellers own interdisciplinary close writing of autobiographical disclosure, experimentation, and performance. Drawing on the critical ideas and poetic forms of queer feminist thinkers, the book argues that Acker and Muellers published, self-published, unpublished, and unfinished work-written closely to the textures of their own precarious and beautiful lives-shifted the boundaries of sexual desire, the sick body, narratives of illness, love, and care, as well as the line separating art and writing"-- Provided by publisher.