The Vicious Red Relic, Love

Book #3 in our Blue Bustard Memoir Series

“Best LGBT Book of 2012” —Laurie Weeks

"Anna Joy Springer fabulates a trauma memoir of losing her bipolar lover to AIDS and, in so doing, creates a unique literary form, one that ignores the often fraught line between truth and fiction in pursuit of something more elusive" —American Book Review

“A powerful book of love, trauma, loss, and forgiveness.” —Lambda Literary

“A page turner...electric” —Alice Notley, author of The Descent of Alette and Culture of One

“There is only one Anna Joy Springer. Only one. Her words take me from kitten to monster and back again in a way only she can do. I love this book.” —Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre

“Anna Joy Springer’s The Vicious Red Relic, Love is a gnarly siren song of a book.... [O]nce read, it will live perfectly inside you forever.” —HTMLGiant

“This writing just turns me on. The blatantness. The naming. The pain of becoming and being revealed by way of the prurient requirements of our relations.” —The Lit Pub

"With intelligence and heart she enlarges the things of which a novel is capable. How very lucky I am to have read it!" —Carole Maso , author of AVA and Break Every Rule

“My god, this book is beautiful... Each sentence is a journey.” —Doug Rice, author of Between Appear and Disappear and Blood of Mugwump: A Tiresian Tale of Incest

“She writes about sex, lust, passion, power so damn well, too damn well. She doesn't separate any of it. She keeps it close. Tight and scary.... I highly recommend this book.” —The Collagist

Anna Joy Springer is a prose writer and visual artist who makes grotesques - creating hybrid texts that combine sacred and profane elements to evoke intensely embodied conceptual-emotional experiences in readers. Formerly a singer in the Bay Area bands, Blatz, The Gr'ups, and Cypher in the Snow, Anna Joy has toured the United States and Europe being a wild feminist punk performer, and also toured with the all-women spoken word extravaganza, Sister Spit. She is author of the illustrated novella, The Birdwisher (Birds of Lace). She received her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, and is now Associate Professor of Literature at University of California at San Diego, where she truly loves teaching courses in Experimental Writing, Graphic Texts, and Postmodern Feminist Literatures.