SOURCE: "An Exercise in Public Drowning," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 22, 1992, p. 8.

In the following review, Braverman offers an unfavorable assessment of Portrait of an Eye.

Kathy Acker has achieved cult status in the small-press world, presumably for the graphic sexual content of her fictions and the nasty bad-girl attitude that fuels them. She is, fundamentally, an experimental minimalist. This collection consists of three mini-"novels" (two of them are fewer than 100 pages) which were previously self-published in the early and mid-70s. And one wonders at the wisdom of bringing forth such raw and marginal early efforts.

The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula is a series of disparate fragments, fantasies and meditations by a protagonist who may or may not be imagining that she is turning into a large black insect without feelings. There are unconnected sequences in which the...