Alessandrelli, Jeff: And Yet

Pank Books, paperback

Publication Date: June 7th, 2022

Publisher Marketing: An innovative work of speculative fiction, Jeff Alessandrelli's AND YET interrogates contemporary shyness, selfhood and sexual mores, drawing out the particulars of each through personal history, cultural commentary and the author's own restless imagination. AND YET builds off the work of authors as disparate as Michel Leiris, Marguerite Duras and Kobo Abe, while quoting from and alluding to texts by Susan Sontag, Young Thug, Young Jean Lee, Cesare Pavese, Sylvia Plath and Louise Glück, among others. At the same time, however, AND YET is entirely itself, with a nameless, self-questioning millennial protagonist simultaneously proud and afraid of his formidable interiority. Love is a thing full of anxious fear, especially when what you ultimately love and fear is your self, writes Alessandrelli, and AND YET draws such a notion down, out and around again, finally arriving at its own idiosyncratic answers.

AND YET asks, what might be gained or lost from living one's life via text instead of directly participating in the world? Through aphorism, anecdote, observation, and personal narrative, Alessandrelli examines the complex entanglements of sexuality and desire. A profound and concise work of self-construction.-- Patrick Cottrell

What I find compelling about AND YET is its Leirisian insistence on the 'unattenuated crudity' of candid self-disclosure as it juggles its intellectual bricolage and its generational concerns with its speculative fictional narrative. Amid meditations on quotations revealing a fairly individual reading sensibility--Cyril Connolly!--AND YET nonetheless takes on the momentum of a page-turner; I found myself wondering, 'What'll happen to the poor bastard? Will I still like him at the end?' like I was reading a thriller instead of a hybrid whuzzit investigating millennial dilemmas of sex, gender, and intimacy, one written in the grand tradition of poet's prose. In the immortal words of Bon Scott, 'It's harder than it looks!' --Garrett Caples

Composed in delicately and suggestively connected fragments, Jeff Alessandrelli's AND YET is a lyrical yet probing investigation of the nature of modern intimacy, full of heart but always meticulously thoughtful.--Joe Moran

In Jeff Alessandrelli's AND YET, love is a song he's afraid to sing. So he finds an unnamed singer to do it for him. Memoir and fiction mix with anaphora and shyness in this book, while quotes from Sontag and Jane's Addiction, Kafka and Flight of the Conchords conjoin the text. Through short sections like bursts, AND YET contends with the sexual crap and selfinvolvement of manhood to locate selfawareness and tenderness. AND YET circles a self in conversation with a self who might learn to get free, to love, himself, just yet.--Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel