The Vicious Red Relic, Love: a Fabulist Memoir

?A page-turner, fast and muscular, electric.? ? poet Alice Notley "There is only one Anna Joy Springer. Only one. Her words take me from kitten to monster and back again in a way only she can do." ? Kathleen Hanna, leader singer of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre "How to describe the charm, wit, innocence and energy in Anna Joy Springer's Red Relic? ? How very lucky I am to have read it!" ? novelist Carole Maso Anna Joy Springer was lead singer and songwriter for the influential punk band Blatz that came out of The 924 Gilman Street Project and Lookout! Records, alongside bands like The Yeastie Girlz and Green Day. She later sang with The Gr?ups and Cypher in the Snow, and toured with Sister Spit, a raucous all-woman group of writers headed by Michelle Tea. The Vicious Red Relic, Love, re-enacts Springer?s relationship with [Gil], a sometimes endearing, sometimes frightening addict and cult survivor who did not disclose to Springer that she?d tested positive for HIV. Brilliantly conceived as a training manual, survival guide and time machine, the book returns to 1990s San Francisco and deftly weaves feminism, deviance, punk rock and Sumerian literature into a cauldron of post-Reagan/Bush-era neoliberalism and AIDs grief.