In 2010, Paul Chan and I had this conversation. A few years later, we were drinking at the El Quijote bar and I remarked how much fun that had been, and shouldn’t we do something else together? He responded by saying that Badlands Unlimited, his press, should publish me. The eventual result was The Best Most Useless Dress:

Widely known as an incisive critic for The New York Times and Artforum, Claudia La Rocco is also a poet and performer whose hybrid texts are as mercurial and imaginative as her criticism. The Best Most Useless Dress reveals the breadth and depth of La Rocco’s art, encompassing a decade’s worth of poetry, essays, performance texts and reviews. These writings explore how movement and rhythm — in time, through space, across bodies, on the page — engender experience itself. Jay Sanders, curator of performing arts at the Whitney, writes: “Claudia La Rocco’s impactful writing sketches its performing subjects in real time, depicting not only the character of work, but the conditions in which it collectively forms and exists. Here the spaces of New York performance and the spaces of critical writing reveal themselves anew.” The book includes an introduction by poet Elizabeth Robinson.