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A Primer for Cadavers
One of the most widely celebrated artists of his generation, Ed Atkins makes videos, draws, and writes, developing a complex and deeply figured discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world — from computer generated imagery to bathetic poetry — are hysterically rehearsed.
A Primer for Cadavers, a startlingly original first collection, brings together a selection of his texts from 2010 to 2016. ‘Part prose-poetry, part theatrical direction, part script-work, part dream-work,’ writes Joe Luna in his afterword, ‘Atkins’ texts present something as fantastic and commonplace as the record of a creation, the diary of a writer glued to the screen of their own production, an elegiac, erotic Frankenstein for the twenty-first century.’
‘Discomfited by being a seer as much as an elective mute, Ed Atkins, with his mind on our crotch, careens between plainsong and unrequited romantic muttering. Alert to galactic signals from some unfathomable pre-human history, vexed by a potentially inhuman future, all the while tracking our desperate right now, he do masculinity in different voices – and everything in the vicinity shimmers, ominously.’
— Bruce Hainley, author of Under the Sign of [sic]
‘How can cadavers seem so alive, speak so eloquently? Atkins’ prose is urgent, sometimes even breathless, seeming to stumble over its own material conditions. His is a unique voice that captures a truly embodied intelligence.’
— David Joselit, author of After Art
‘Atkins’ writing spores from the body, scraping through life matter’s nervous stuff, leaving us agitated and eager. What’s appealed to us is an odd mix of mimetic futures. Cancer exists, tattoos, squids, and kissing exist – all felt in the mouth as pulsing questions.’
— Holly Pester, author of Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip
‘If you had to pick one artist currently having a profound impact on his contemporaries, you would have to choose Ed Atkins... He programmes almost all his computer animation himself and writes exceptional stream-of consciousness poetry that feeds into his works.’
— Francesca Gavin, Dazed and Confused
Ed Atkins is a British artist based in Berlin. In recent years, he has presented solo shows at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, and MoMA PS1 in New York, among others. His writing has appeared in October, Texte zur Kunst, frieze, The White Review, Hi Zero and EROS Journal. A Primer for Cadavers is his first collection.
Joe Luna writes poetry and critical prose out of Brighton, UK. He teaches literature at the University of Sussex.
A Primer for Cadavers, a startlingly original first collection, brings together a selection of his texts from 2010 to 2016. ‘Part prose-poetry, part theatrical direction, part script-work, part dream-work,’ writes Joe Luna in his afterword, ‘Atkins’ texts present something as fantastic and commonplace as the record of a creation, the diary of a writer glued to the screen of their own production, an elegiac, erotic Frankenstein for the twenty-first century.’
‘Discomfited by being a seer as much as an elective mute, Ed Atkins, with his mind on our crotch, careens between plainsong and unrequited romantic muttering. Alert to galactic signals from some unfathomable pre-human history, vexed by a potentially inhuman future, all the while tracking our desperate right now, he do masculinity in different voices – and everything in the vicinity shimmers, ominously.’
— Bruce Hainley, author of Under the Sign of [sic]
‘How can cadavers seem so alive, speak so eloquently? Atkins’ prose is urgent, sometimes even breathless, seeming to stumble over its own material conditions. His is a unique voice that captures a truly embodied intelligence.’
— David Joselit, author of After Art
‘Atkins’ writing spores from the body, scraping through life matter’s nervous stuff, leaving us agitated and eager. What’s appealed to us is an odd mix of mimetic futures. Cancer exists, tattoos, squids, and kissing exist – all felt in the mouth as pulsing questions.’
— Holly Pester, author of Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip
‘If you had to pick one artist currently having a profound impact on his contemporaries, you would have to choose Ed Atkins... He programmes almost all his computer animation himself and writes exceptional stream-of consciousness poetry that feeds into his works.’
— Francesca Gavin, Dazed and Confused
Ed Atkins is a British artist based in Berlin. In recent years, he has presented solo shows at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, and MoMA PS1 in New York, among others. His writing has appeared in October, Texte zur Kunst, frieze, The White Review, Hi Zero and EROS Journal. A Primer for Cadavers is his first collection.
Joe Luna writes poetry and critical prose out of Brighton, UK. He teaches literature at the University of Sussex.
- GenresPoetryShort Stories
463 pages, Paperback
First published September 14, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 19, 2025
‘Ammonia; dark sweats; citrus bleach; ready salted potato.
An apex of the sensational, is what I thought. Which hardly trips off the tongue but does FIST the brain, necessarily.’
Electrifying. Loud, unrestrained play of language, elastic syntax, dicey placement of words, lines, everything — yet retaining coherence with quiet rigour. This is exactly the kind of weird, and the ‘right’ level of unhinged that I find quite satisfying. Probably wouldn’t recommend consuming it all at once; but pretty much perfect to binge over the span of about a week/more. Every line is bizarrely scrumptious. Utterly spoiled with a buffet of literary textures. Crisp, loud, maddening; sort of addictive too. Didn’t care much/enough about the illustrations, but still quite nice to have them in there.
‘I wanted to put to you a thought about the formal cogency of the eyelash as a typeface. To put to shame the contrived efforts of my hand. That equivalence: of eyelash to discrete line to slight-inked line to compelling glyph; that ‘I’ that points back to itself, a chink in the curtain through which a mirror might be glimpsed. – Only exploded, expanded to encapsulate the entire person. Like yet more eyelashes, braided together into a double helix, centrifugally spun to life.’
‘An abattoir in July. Which is what I wanted to say – what I wanted to ask in saying so: to ask, to imply. You wield what is equivalent to one of those bolt guns for thumping pig’s brains off cliffs. Or one of those pneumatic forelegs for riveting your audience by the thigh to this chair.’
‘I wanted to ask if love might productively be thought of as the faith that the body that formed the eyelash and, with a SLEIGHT of tender hand, laid it, like some foetal mammal, beneath my foreskin. That, say, love would be the devout faith that that generous, necessary body were still very much warm, muscled, alive.’
Atkins uses a whole circus of ‘words’ most of us don’t even frequent on a daily basis, and somehow the sheer experience of reading them all — congregated in these pages, weirdly brilliantly — is just an oddly satisfying literary treat. Feral, but lovely. Perhaps more accurately — feral and lovely. An extremely anal form of feral-ness. To me, not a regurgitated hot mess (even though some readers have expressed this sentiment). Confessedly, I skimmed the last ‘poem’ (which takes up quite a lot of pages, over 50?) because it just wasn’t for me, and/but if not for that, this might be 5* for me.
‘That the topology of space-time is totally fucking complex and mathematical and shit and people say with confidence that space-time (at least from a general relativistic view) is globally and locally smooth, flat and continuous—And it’s only the fucking quantum, bubonic devil detail writhing like a snared reptile in the torrid jungle of your intoxicating crotch that prevents this being true.’
To clarify, I don’t think I know what the context of the book is, but I’m just a witness to its poetic outburst. Here for the vibes, just selfishly taking it all in. And can confirm that it’s a piece of work/book that’s really worth one’s time. Exchange some time for this experience, believe it. The ‘Afterword’ by Luna also begins with a Clarice Lispector’s quote, which says a lot, and it simply validates my feelings about the whole experience/book.
‘Well, my darling interlocutory passerine, who tenderly repossesses the sorely possessed over and over and through a mouth rapaciously giving out entire hissing summers of wet green noise to drown out nothing so much as ignorance—which tends to the long-dead blue-sky-thinking thaumaturges, whose blood is now so despoiled of oxygen they may as well be forcibly identified as dreaming acanthuses, leaves carefully lifted in the already known to be futile hunt for a pair of jewel-like lungs or simply something recognizable as genitals.’
‘Help me communicate without debasement, darling.
Help me communicate outside of peremptory assault, my love.’
‘Your fleet tongue and I really drew ourselves up, hearing that, all maffled at the departure gate, sundered together, you and I, chucking thousands of full water bottles down chutes at the behest. It’s not as if we kissed as hot and held as all that: my hands were all over: done. Though we went and got sprained and definitely teared saliva and pooled beneath your tongue, easy, like. Easily enough to wind up those holographic jobs-worthies who can only burble the loopy speech of anti-erotic agony.’
‘In a bit, the super-rich time-travelling in order to snipe dinosaurs in the massive, artless face and with expanding/depleted dum-dums from close range.’
To conclude, the concluding bit from the ‘Afterword’ by Joe Luna :
‘Language will not save the body from becoming fleshy decorum, but it will be a skin with which to endure; this, in Atkins’ words, is writing’s ‘Proper magic against illusion.’ Writing is never a way out but is always a way out of not wanting to get out of not wanting. Something to hold on to, at least.’
August 29, 2019
Atkins’ writing defies firm categories. It is prose, yet are they short stories if there is little if any narrative? Many of them have discernible beginnings and endings, and there are recurring themes and elements. But that describes poetry rather than fiction – and in many ways reading the book is more akin to reading poetry. So let’s call it prose-poetry.
The collection is organized chronologically (besides the so-called introduction), starting with texts from 2010, and it’s a bit of a shame since some of the densest pieces are exactly the older texts. Both “A Tumour (in English)” and “Material Witness or a Liquid Cop” are long and opaque pieces, due to which Atkins might lose a reader or two, whereas three stories from 2011 (“A Primer for Cadavers”, “Air for Concrete”, and “Depression”) are exquisite. There’s plenty of humor, but also some deep existentialism in many of the pieces:
The texts revolve around all things corporeal, in minutest and often disgusting detail. Brains, nails, skins, hairs, limbs, you name it. One of the pieces is about “an eyelash under your foreskin”. Lots of medical and anatomical terminology. I didn’t bother looking up most of them and just went with impressions. The linguistic variety is definitely one of the strengths of the book: the pleasure of reading the book largely derives from spotting uncanny phrases, paradoxical word pairs, just plain weird sentences that evoke stark images in mind. Such as “a bridge formed by leaping jets of whetted electrical current” (p. 21).
In all, it’s a chaotic but certainly interesting collection of... words? Joe Luna’s afterword is worth a read, though I recommend to treat it as a foreword.
The collection is organized chronologically (besides the so-called introduction), starting with texts from 2010, and it’s a bit of a shame since some of the densest pieces are exactly the older texts. Both “A Tumour (in English)” and “Material Witness or a Liquid Cop” are long and opaque pieces, due to which Atkins might lose a reader or two, whereas three stories from 2011 (“A Primer for Cadavers”, “Air for Concrete”, and “Depression”) are exquisite. There’s plenty of humor, but also some deep existentialism in many of the pieces:
Imagining all of the air in a given space – your bedroom, for example – replaced instantaneously with concrete. All of the air, all the apparent space in the world, exchanged in a blink for concrete. Again, everything full, close, cold, dead, dark. INSTANT DEATH. That’s how I’d like to go: all the way from sensation – grounded in the comprehension of greater or lesser distances between myself and everything else – to abject insensation. Nothing but infinite, motionless density. All those gaps in the cosmos, those unaccounted-for spaces between everything and everything else – the infinitesimal rifts between quarks; the vast drifting nothings between galaxies – all of that, suddenly filled-in with concrete. (160–161)
The texts revolve around all things corporeal, in minutest and often disgusting detail. Brains, nails, skins, hairs, limbs, you name it. One of the pieces is about “an eyelash under your foreskin”. Lots of medical and anatomical terminology. I didn’t bother looking up most of them and just went with impressions. The linguistic variety is definitely one of the strengths of the book: the pleasure of reading the book largely derives from spotting uncanny phrases, paradoxical word pairs, just plain weird sentences that evoke stark images in mind. Such as “a bridge formed by leaping jets of whetted electrical current” (p. 21).
In all, it’s a chaotic but certainly interesting collection of... words? Joe Luna’s afterword is worth a read, though I recommend to treat it as a foreword.
dnf
June 15, 2019DNF. I struggled to get any sort of foothold in this work. It begins as below and carries on in the same vein for 480 pages. The only bits that resonated with me were the rather frequent ums and ers:
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK
Dears –
Millions of urgent, mega-bereaved children will hurl wills wedged inside denuded plastic bottles and at cursed lakes forever choked with same,
X. A little later, after-hours, lining the shore they’re, um, perfectly normally reflexively force-gagging one another with forebear’s forefingers – which come in stiff pairings (snapped off at the love), tightly parcelled in red paisley bandanas that are now, we understand, browning and sodden with an unchecked gravy of same,
X.
Said ramming home so said summoning asphyxial opinions and sadly so soon after our super-hot bodies disentangled,
X. My mind is in your crotch,
X, while I sit staring at this piano’s tremendously INTELLIGIBLE anachronisms; the acceptance of this pen’s disabilities; the blithe arrogance of a fat analogue wristwatch,
X. Conservatively speaking, the machine-chamfered tools of late phallic whittling abound and universally, so honestly,
X, very much capable of honing any stubborn shape into the absolute SPIT. Normally, blunt knives designed as such and held just so for really wholesome bruising, in the main (a particular pedagogic method: firm, spheroidal fruit wielded inside ivory, Egyptian cotton pillowcases). So very nearly a joke, right? A cut, then, is only WORRIED into the world once weeks are spent on one rose-maddening patch of WINNING inner thigh, which, er, resembles nothing so incisive as the act of a blade, but rather ripping or snagging of clumsy child portions from a dim source with your monstrous fingernails,
X – under which we will retrieve dark evidence of that vast out-of-town mattress of toxic green moss and a lover’s forensic picnic at the site thereof, comprising Alertec® ‘corroborated’ by kale and vivid yellow slime-mould, right? Recuperated, if needs be, post mortem. That’s a threat. Hence the urgency around will penning, if law is to be so very previous.
Other weeks the whole thing just feels so, um, dumbly squandered on worthily enervated abstinence; your sole vignetted eye kept till bloodshot and weeping on today’s such-and-such remedial shrine, fucktard. Remember,
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK
Dears –
Millions of urgent, mega-bereaved children will hurl wills wedged inside denuded plastic bottles and at cursed lakes forever choked with same,
X. A little later, after-hours, lining the shore they’re, um, perfectly normally reflexively force-gagging one another with forebear’s forefingers – which come in stiff pairings (snapped off at the love), tightly parcelled in red paisley bandanas that are now, we understand, browning and sodden with an unchecked gravy of same,
X.
Said ramming home so said summoning asphyxial opinions and sadly so soon after our super-hot bodies disentangled,
X. My mind is in your crotch,
X, while I sit staring at this piano’s tremendously INTELLIGIBLE anachronisms; the acceptance of this pen’s disabilities; the blithe arrogance of a fat analogue wristwatch,
X. Conservatively speaking, the machine-chamfered tools of late phallic whittling abound and universally, so honestly,
X, very much capable of honing any stubborn shape into the absolute SPIT. Normally, blunt knives designed as such and held just so for really wholesome bruising, in the main (a particular pedagogic method: firm, spheroidal fruit wielded inside ivory, Egyptian cotton pillowcases). So very nearly a joke, right? A cut, then, is only WORRIED into the world once weeks are spent on one rose-maddening patch of WINNING inner thigh, which, er, resembles nothing so incisive as the act of a blade, but rather ripping or snagging of clumsy child portions from a dim source with your monstrous fingernails,
X – under which we will retrieve dark evidence of that vast out-of-town mattress of toxic green moss and a lover’s forensic picnic at the site thereof, comprising Alertec® ‘corroborated’ by kale and vivid yellow slime-mould, right? Recuperated, if needs be, post mortem. That’s a threat. Hence the urgency around will penning, if law is to be so very previous.
Other weeks the whole thing just feels so, um, dumbly squandered on worthily enervated abstinence; your sole vignetted eye kept till bloodshot and weeping on today’s such-and-such remedial shrine, fucktard. Remember,
August 24, 2022
a primer for cadavers is brilliant. it is an example of its own. experimental, witty and very personal i would say. however, as a non-native, i found it very difficult to follow. i found myself lost, reading without understanding, i felt in a limbo. therefore my judgement is very personal, but still i truly recommend this book to anyone really. i thank the afterword by joe luna, it helped to give an image to this very difficult writing.
March 24, 2024
Fucked up and amazing. A Mobius strip of sublime language and horrific body, the psychotic slippage of reference and the smell of shit dressed up for Church as a happy family.
August 12, 2022
there is kind of a shockingly large amount of low-hanging editorial errors here (esp with parentheses, but also just not-caught misspellings) which makes me just wonder more if people dont really try to read books like this
ed atkins' writing is obviously a joy to read tho always
ed atkins' writing is obviously a joy to read tho always
Read
February 10, 2019This collection of Ed Atkins written work is comprehensive. I found his use of language inspiring. There was one piece about a tumor layed out so a tumor-shaped space was featured in the middle of every page. A cheap trick, you might say, but it's effect, page after page, along with the visceral description of the tumor in your, the reader's, body was powerful, and a bit unsettling.
Otherwise, Atkins is working on ideas I just don't understand and gave up trying about 100 pages from the end.
Otherwise, Atkins is working on ideas I just don't understand and gave up trying about 100 pages from the end.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews