Playing Dirty is full of dirty jokes. Arguing that the early modern excremental body is in many ways an erotic body, Will Stockton--with humor and dry wit--reads psychoanalytic theory through early modern comedies, claiming that it is helpful, rather than inimical, to the project of historicizing the body.
Noting that psychoanalysis has traditionally operated in a paranoid framework that relentlessly produces evidence of the same "truths," Stockton turns to a minority practice in psychoanalysis--associated with Jean Laplanche--to develop a more "playful" analytic for literary...

The devotional, unrelenting, deviant Crush is a linguistic feast: the word is everything in Stockton's and Gilson's world, except when it isn't, except when it's time we "shoved // our jeans down and stepped / into the world." This is a sensual - perhaps a better word is bodily - collection, the scent of shit and frowsy hats and bleach and the boy who "always smelled / like cat litter" adding some much-needed filth to poetic longing - for what is longing, frankly, without the cleanup after? There are texts and subtexts and Facebook-stalks; there are at times startlingly tender moments, as in...