Overview

"Amidst the ruins of Detroit, two seekers question all that they thought they knew as they struggle to achieve spiritual awakening in this collaborative memoir. Guided by Ryan, an eccentric mystic from the suburbs, the pair explore a ramshackle city while running experiments on themselves in a bid for understanding who they are and what life means. But as the questions Ryan poses deepen, the two are left wondering what happens when you truly ""kick out the bottom."""

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9781960329042

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"""Yes, 'kick out the jams' was one generation's provocation, but Mortenson and Kramer inhabited in their youth a heady mixture of punkish aesthetics and neo-hip mysticism. They give us a Detroit that was on the edge of massive re-transformation even as they were themselves on their way to new modes of living. The inner-city education of these two somehow circles around the personality of a suburban quasi-guru. They've never been the same, and neither has Detroit."" -Aldon Lynn Nielsen George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature The Pennsylvania State University ""Kick Out the Bottom captures the authors' yearning to invent a new world and a new sense of personhood from the bottom up. In Rilkean fashion, Kick Out the Bottom explores characters who are willing to change their lives as they endure an archetypal search for meaning via self-estrangement on the way to self-recomposition in Detroit, a post-apocalyptic Parisian bohemia itself experiencing transformations."" -Daniel Morris Professor of English, Purdue University editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900 ""Kick Out the Bottom is the future of literature, or, to appropriate from the Detroit that the book transcends, we may ask, 'Is there a Kick Out the Bottom in your future?' Christopher Kramer and Erik Mortenson ask us why the one-person memoir should be the norm. As two people who find themselves in a new and undefinable Detroit, Kramer and Mortenson share a common language, and, after all, we all borrow from one another. Why must memoir writing be such a lonely task? Perhaps more important, however, as Kramer's and Mortenson's previously lost-to-history mentor advises, 'Why not kick out the bottom and come out the other side?' What comes out is a veritable 'new tense, one that looks backwards but strives to contain a lost moment's impact as it bleeds into the present of the telling.' In many ways, Kramer and Mortenson may have achieved the first post-Walter Benjamin memoir worthy of Benjamin and his theory of temporal intimacies. "" -Stephen Paul Miller Professor of English, St. John's University author of Being with a Bullet"

Author Information

Erik Mortenson is a literary scholar, writer, translator, and faculty member in English at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan. After earning a PhD from Wayne State University in Detroit, Erik spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany before journeying to Koç University in Istanbul to help found the English and Comparative Literature Department. After spending more than a decade abroad, he returned to the U.S. shortly after the 2016 coup. His scholarly work focuses on American literary and visual texts and their intersection with the cultural concerns of the twentieth-century. Erik has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as three books: Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (2011), Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016), and Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). Christopher Kramer (Christopher of Detroit) is the author of the novels The Invisible Histories of the Spiral Mountain (2014), The Erotic Tales of Bucephalus (2017), and Dominique's Confession: A Roaring Twenties Dark Romance (2020). In his tales of magic and mysticism, he examines philosophical dualities, transitions of the psyche, alternate realities, and spiritual revelations. Christopher is also an artist and illustrator with over twenty exhibitions. His illustrations appear in the Tenebre Horror Anthology (2021) and Illustrated Worlds magazine (2023). His work also appears in the first edition of Dark Spirits: The Magical Art of Rosaleen Norton and Austin Osman Spare (2012) in a limited-edition print.

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