Freak Wonder - by Jim Brodey (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Jim was like this messenger of chaos. He had this notion of poetry as performance way ahead of his time. He was fabulous. --Eileen Myles

Poet, rock critic, "voracious post-lysergic romantic," and fixture of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, Jim Brodey was a friend to Frank O'Hara, Duane Allman, and Eve Babitz. He was known as an otherworldly messenger, who, Eileen Myles notes, "writes with a rich, disturbing kind of balance." Bringing together poems from the 1950s to his death from AIDS in 1993, Freak Wonder: The Collected Poems of Jim Brodey is the definitive volume of Brodey's work, a collection cut through with the surreal rock-and-roll resonances of sex, drugs, and poetics at the margins of American culture.

Review Quotes

"A voracious post-lysergic romantic."

--John Godfrey

"Brodey's] poetry is as full of the warp and woof of relentless aesthetic experimentation as it is the ecstasy and agony of his vivid, too-brief life."

--Nick Sturm, Poetry Foundation

About the Author

Nick Sturm teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta. His book Publishing the New York School: Small Press Communities and American Poetry is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He is the editor of Early Works by Alice Notley (Fonograf Editions) and co-editor, with Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan, of Get the Money!: Collected Prose, 1961-1983 by Ted Berrigan (City Lights). More information about his research, scholarship, and teaching can be found at nicksturm.com.