The Kafka Sutra

Poems

What if Franz Kafka, that master of frustration, failure, and despair, had written the ancient Sanskrit sex manual The Kama Sutra? Robert Archambeau explores this question in the illustrated series of parables that begins his collection The Kafka Sutra. Other questions behind the pieces in this book concern glam rock, fatherhood, Afro-Caribbean and Belgian Surrealism, Conceptualism, Hiroshima, the sad lot of the English professor, and similar vital matters of these, our troubled times.

Madhat, Inc.
September 2, 2015
120 pages

Praise for The Kafka Sutra

Archambeau’s absolutely hilarious Kama Sutra spoof made me howl with laughter.
     —Wendy Doniger, Professor Emerita of the History of Religions, UChicago

The Kafka Sutra is an accomplished book—thoughtfully put together, formally and linguistically adept, comfortable with a wide range of cultural idioms, responsive to world events.
—The Chicago Review

Archambeau has a musical technique that keeps life’s surging anarchy personalized through the universally usable Kama Sutra. I’m using it right now!
—Andrei Codrescu

The Kafka Sutra is an entertaining volume ... as well as an act of critical mediation, perhaps pointing towards a post-conceptualist dispensation in which current polarizations will seem as narrow as the last century’s regarding meter.

 —The Notre Dame Review

Robert Archambeau’s far-ranging mind “riffs on, or remixes, replies to, or makes deeply unfaithful translations of what others have written.” It is all splendidly here, in aces.
—Maxine Chernoff

Here, at last, is a book guaranteed not to improve your sex life. I suggest all copies be confiscated and burned.
—Michael Robbins

Kafka meets Kama Sutra meets sex trouble meets pop culture meets fatherhood meets academe and criticism meets glam rock meets literature meets politics—got that all down?—in Robert Archambeau’s bizarre, witty, perspicacious new collection. The writing is supple, oxygen-filled and rigorous. The Kafka Sutra is sometimes even willing to be lovely. It’s also different from anything else you’ve read. And—do you get to say this often about poetry?—it is lots of fun.
—Daisy Fried

In this inviting and brilliant collection, Archambeau mashes up Kafka and the Kama Sutra in a series of hilarious, sexy illustrated narratives. And he writes with enviable wit, playfulness, and nimble erudition.  This is a fierce, fun book.
—Kevin Prufer

I’m pretty sure I was the only one reading poetry as I waited for my car to be serviced, but certainly I was the one who rocked the other customers out of their torpor with a belly laugh, since I was reading Robert Archambeau’s addictive poems. If you’re heading to the dealership and are looking for brainy, funny lines delivered with a rueful sigh, The Kafka Sutra is definitely the book for you.
—David Kirby