Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and assignments that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passengerâs leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for âstranger.â Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friendâs stinky feet. Koestenbaum dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenbergâs squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to listeners: âBuy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina.â âDescribe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed.â âFind in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness...Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history.â Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play from âone of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing todayâ (John Waters).