Advanced Elvis Course
Introduction by Isabel Waidner
2025
Peninsula Press UK
Description
In this heartfelt exploration of queer fandom, legendary poet CAConrad charts the lasting power and pull of Elvis.
When CAConrad’s reverence for the King puts them on a trip to Memphis, the result is this wild joyride of a book, a homage that is bursting with love and twisted sincerity.
Drawing on sources as disparate as graffiti, talk-show interviews, phone messages, and poetry, Conrad assembles a collage that celebrates while laughing with the cult of Elvis.
Advanced Elvis Course is a psychedelic road trip – a transcendental portrait of a man who changed music and America forever, seen through the eyes of those for whom he still lives.
Reviews
One of America’s most legendary living poets.
—Ocean Vuong
[CAConrad] surges ahead in experiment and lasting power.
—Maggie Nelson
1st Edition
Part psychedelic road-trip travelogue, part “Overheard in Graceland,” part mystic-religious devotional, CAConrad’s unabated love for the King puts him on a pilgrimage to Memphis; on an Advanced Elvis Course. These bizarre, multifaceted short pieces are an homage bursting with love, oddball white trash, and twisted sincerity.
Using a mélange of breathless energy and flamboyant desire, Conrad ensnares his reader from the first vignette, leaving us no choice but to doggedly follow him around the backwaters of Memphis. Conrad blurs the distinction between real and fictional experience to create a transcendental portrait of the legendary Elvis—the man who changed music and America forever. Through sources as disparate as graffiti, talk-show interviews, phone messages, and poetry, Conrad (whose unfettered energy is about as reality-based as an evening at Graceland) constructs a semimystical collage both celebrating and laughing with the cult of Elvis.
Get ready for a surreal tour of a celebrity-obsessed, picaresque America from one of its most unusual guides. Conrad delights in turning his fantasies into our reality, making this frenetic fictionalized experience “as real as if it were real.”
2009
ISBN: 9781593762438
Soft Skull Press