ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two early novellas by Acker, The Burning Bombing of America and The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, demonstrating how her punk aesthetics emerge and become a strategy for this female radical writer in the aftermath of the counterculture. I read The Burning Bombing of America’s mix of psychedelia and proto-punk devices as marking the limits of countercultural textuality for a woman writer and heralding the end of the counterculture as a politico-cultural project. I then show how Acker expands her proto-punk techniques into a basic form of punk writing in The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula. Punk poetics provides a repertoire of devices and a potent sensibility that can respond to the limitations of countercultural literary form and a related sense of confinement for the politicised female subject.
