SHAME (Signed & Numbered)

Shame may be the most perdurably uncategorizable and daring book Robert Kelly has yet published during a career containing more than sixty sui generis volumes. It is a purloined correspondence, an investigatory improvisation, an apologia, a psychological expose, a desideratum, a profundity, and jazz. Yet, Shame is a collaboration. When Birgit Kempker -- a younger German writer living in Basel, Switzerland -- invited Kelly to create a work together, neither knew the other except by reputation. They proceeded to communicate by e-mail for two years through sixteen exchanges, and the subject was to be shame at its most personal, prosaic, intimate, and even sometimes fetching; and shame at its most generic, couched, poetic and hallucinatory. The barrier between them was not merely not knowing one another while risking the limits of naked trust, but of surmounting age, gender, nationality and language. Birgit Kempker wrote in German, and Robert Kelly in English. Shame is a love story. A story of two tongues. Shame is a book spoken between two lovers who will never be lovers, a book of the unabashed and prised apart secret intimacy that can be laid bare against all constraint by ghostly lovers -- virtual, exemplary, psychic guides to one another, and all of the rest of us.

Robert Kelly's first book, Armed Descent, was published in 1961. In addtion to more than fifty books of poetry, he has written novels, a considerable number of short stories, and essays. He teaches in the Writing Program at Bard College, and lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, the translator Charlotte Mandell. Birgit Kempker was born in Wuppertal, Germany. She now lives in Basel, where she works as a poet, essayist, translator, novelist, dramatist, and performance artist. Recipient of many prizes and fellowships, she has published thirteen books, and has produced a dozen theatrical and radio plays.