SOURCE: "Breaking Patriarchal Myths," in New Directions for Women, Vol. 16, No. 4, July, 1987, p. 18.

Below, Chase provides a favorable review of Don Quixote.

Kathy Acker's Don Quixote is a witty, irreverent and pained collage that explores a woman's search for identify and sexual love, exposing patriarchal myths and institutions in the process. In this story Don Quixote is a contemporary woman, a knight whose adventures take her, as she recovers from an abortion, through landscapes of geography and psyche. In predatory, nihilistic New York and London former lovers are remembered, dogs become people of indistinct or changing gender, American history is rewritten and transformed with little conventional narrative and no plot, much dialogue and many stories within stories. Through it all Acker mocks, questions and breaks apart conventions of gender, sexuality and power.

The book focuses on sexual love, power and violence and the chasm that separates women's experiences...