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

"Wow! It's so wild. It's so much like jazz and so far away from English and French poetry. It's American and really original. It's amazing. Isn't it? Brodey defined the freedom of the sixties better than anyone else."--Alex Katz

"The master of ecstatic, otherworldly digression, Jim Brodey, is finally back in print, in a book edited to perfection! In the 1990s, we read his poems at AIDS fundraisers because his words pulled everyone into the love of a makeshift family when we needed him most! The generosity and beauty of this book's arrangement and design honor Brodey's extraordinary life and work for new generations of the wild, queer transcendence!"--CAConrad

"The posthumous publication of Jim Brodey's last poems reveals a poet rather different than the fellow I met. It is a clear illustration, were one needed, of how a great gift sometimes transcends the needs and fractures of the body or mind."--Kevin Killian

"He writes with a rich, disturbing kind of balance--his poems are frequently raunchy enough to ease you into accepting their nearly religious sweetness. Few poets can comfortably speak in such lofty tones. Brodey can actually make you believe it."--Eileen Myles

"Certain artists . . . have been nearly suppressed and their technical innovations and linguistic turns attributed to later dogmatists. Brodey is one of these significant poets. He took Frank O'Hara's empirical personism, collaborated, as it were, with the jazzy autotelic clusters of Clark Coolidge and Ceravolo, and finally emerged before his death from AIDS with synthetic, satirical, muscular elegies of a late turbulence. His poetry is wildly erotic and convincingly strange. . . . With this volume, the independent, alarming, and expansive Brodey makes a permanent appearance."--David Shapiro

"Blessed be the intimate cosmic vocabularied yawp of wild flying crab language devoted to the depths of friendship and despair, love and loneliness, sex and music--the pure scale of fabled velvet weirdnesses in the profoundly populated poems of Jim Brodey, whose fantastically moving body of Freak Wonder is finally re-released into a hopefully deserving world."--Anselm Berrigan

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.