Soon after Kathy Acker’s 1997 death from breast cancer, I attended a December ceremony in which her ashes were transferred to an urn. The gold-plated box provided by the Tijuana crematorium was nearly impossible to open. People joked nervously about Pandora’s box. Flames crackled in the fireplace, throwing shadows across the walls and ceiling, and across the tense faces of the 17 of us present. A psychic began a ritual. The scene was as eerie and dramatic as the one I imagine occurring that lightning-swept night in Geneva when the Shelleys, Byron, and John Polidori challenged one another to write ghost stories.

Juliette, a Bavarian biker, removed an elaborate switchblade from her belt and broke the box open. Then she plucked out a large bone shard and cradled it in her palm. She’d met Kathy at the gym, she said, and had known her for three years before discovering Kathy was a writer. Kathy’s ashes were ground finer than other ashes—a granulated white—and as each person in turn scooped them from the gold box into the Art Nouveau urn, it sounded like coarse gravel falling into a pit. I held back. Touching her ashes would be a violation, I thought—she and I were companionable, but never friends. The psychic stared deep into me as if he were reading my discomfort. It felt like a parlor trick. He instructed us to breathe in fear and chaos and breathe out calm and peace, and then he intoned a Tibetan chant. Later in the evening, over ginger champagne punch, the psychic claimed to have heard wind rustling in the corners of the room. “It was Kathy.”

Afterwards, I kept thinking about Kathy’s ashes, their gritty materiality, the way they fell out of our hands and into the urn, how ashes both fill up and conform to the surround. I connected this with Acker’s writing. Having no center, her writing could infiltrate other avatars, other texts—from Charlotte Brontë to Rimbaud to George Bush Senior to scenes from the soaps she sometimes watched while working on her novels. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

Over and over, Acker tells the same tale: the mother is pregnant with the daughter, and the father leaves. The mother blames the daughter and tries to abort her. The daughter’s body survives, but not her unified self. The mother never stops rejecting the daughter, her final rejection being suicide. The daughter forever seeks the father. This is Acker’s version of her own biography. Is it true? Does it matter? In Acker’s world, torturous rejecting mommies lurk around every corner. All romantic leading men are daddy/her latest unavailable lover. Acker liberates libido from Freud’s repressed underworld. In her novels, libido, now released, takes consciousness hostage, takes the whole world hostage. Acker doesn’t deny Freud. Her literary teleportation machine jumbles his chromosomes and merges them with another species.

Acker never stopped mythologizing in and out of writing, never stopped re-editing herself bigger than life. In the early ’90s, I heard her say she rewrote each of her books four times. In a 1998 essay by Peter Wollen, that number swells to eight: “Acker used to read her own texts too, each one eight times, re-drafting it after each reading: once for meaning, once for beauty, once for sound, once to the mirror to see how it looked, once for rhythm, once for structure, and so on.” Eight is certainly grander than four, and thus it went with Acker’s rococo self-evolution. Was she ever really a sex worker? Some say no. She regularly ate chicken in public, but she would not stop calling herself a vegetarian. Glamorous, bold, and vulgar, Acker was whatever she said she was. Words were magical for her. Words were physical things.

To know Acker was to be swept into a rarified vortex of otherness and genius. One felt as if one were, if not entering, at least dipping one’s toe in literary history. I’ve never seen anyone who read better, who could so command and mesmerize a room. She read slowly and seriously, her eyes making contact over her tiny wire rims. Each word sounded utterly important, vital. It was impossible to zone out, impossible to miss a syllable. She could have made a restaurant menu sound like The Odyssey.

Since her death, Acker’s reputation has fizzled. Without her whirlwind self-promotion, Acker was on the verge of becoming a forgotten genius. Then, in fall 2002, the Acker revival machine kicked into high gear. NYU hosted a major conference on her life and work, and Grove Press released Essential Acker, as well as the complete texts of the previously unpublished early novels Rip-off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America. Acker scholars are popping up like mushrooms—late night confidants, disowned friends, dumped or rejecting lovers, and threatened girlfriends of the dumped or rejecting lovers. “In my first school,” she wrote in My Mother Demonology, “I had been taught that through rationality humans can know and control otherness, our histories and environments. In one of my dreams, the maggot, huge, translucent, and slimy, was my father.” Now that she’s no longer around, can Acker’s libidinal excesses finally be contained, or will they continue to hold consciousness hostage? Like her transgressive forebear William Burroughs, has her writing permanently infected our logic systems; has she sired an immortal strain?

In Essential Acker, the editors present, in roughly chronological order, extended extracts from Acker’s novels and stories, as well as complete shorter pieces, such as the hilarious Hello, I’m Erica Jong. Novelist and art critic Dennis Cooper’s impeccable taste is complemented by former High Risk editor Amy Scholder’s marketing panache. Wisely, the editors have concentrated on the beginnings and endings of Acker’s novels, where she is often at her most dazzling. Oddly missing is Acker’s final novel, Eurydice in the Underworld, which was printed in the UK in 1997, but never in the US. An excerpt from Eurydice would have rounded out the child/parent theme that appears in so many selections in Essential Acker. In Eurydice, the mother still suicides, but Acker approaches a kind of forgiveness.

Jeanette Winterson’s introduction and Scholder’s editor’s notes are serviceable entries into such a solid collection. Winterson listlessly chugs from point to point, suggesting that the source of Acker’s brilliance is her European soul. Scholder’s essay, laden with pomo theory, makes a few good points. For those new to Acker’s writing, Essential Acker makes her work more inviting than ever before. And fans will get an even deeper appreciation of her range and progression from the ultra-formalism of her early work to the hymn-like simplicity of her last novels.

Library shelves are groaning with bloodless formal innovations. Acker’s genius lies in her ability to use formal strategies to crack open the human heart and body. Though Acker eschewed realism, her work offers the emotional intensity and risk that makes realism so addictive. She picks up personal and cultural vectors of fear, lust, betrayal, political angst, and hurls them across the page. When one reads Acker, one is moved in very old-fashioned, sometimes primal, ways. Her writing ranges from brutal to transcendent, from grueling details of torture in Algeria, to the Whitmanesque epiphanies of her final journal: “I am a child of the night; out of me day is beginning. I am a child of the forests and the wilds; I am all that is American.”

To those who admired her, Acker defined hipness. Sometimes she looked clownish in broad-shouldered, space-age body suits or frilly little plaid dresses, but she wore them with the confidence of a rock star. In the ’90s, when Internet excess was hip, she claimed to spend four hours a day online, assuming the mantle of Gibsonesque cybergoddess. She never walked away from risk in her writing or her personal life. To paraphrase the poem Jack Hirschman read at her memorial in San Francisco, there are many kinds of cancer, but there was only one Kathy Acker.

Dodie Bellamy’s latest book Cunt-Ups (Tender Buttons) won the 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for poetry. Her other books include The Letters of Mina Harker (Hard Press) and Feminine Hijinx (Hanuman). She lives in San Francisco.