Freak Wonder - by Jim Brodey (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The landmark Collected Poems of Jim Brodey--downtown poet, rock critic, "voracious post-lysergic romantic," and fixture of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture in New York City and beyond.

Although his work has fallen into relative obscurity since his death in 1993, the poet Jim Brodey was friends with everyone in his day: from Duane Allman and The Band to Frank O'Hara 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

"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

"[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.