Jack Spicer, unlike his contemporaries Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, was a poet who disdained publishing and relished his role as a social outcast. He died in 1965 virtually unrecognized, yet in the following years his work and thought have attracted and intrigued an international audience. Now this comprehensive biography gives a pivotal poet his due. Based on interviews with scores of Spicer's contemporaries, Poet Be Like God details the most intimate aspects of Spicer's life-his family, his friends, his lovers-illuminating not only the man but also many of his poems. Such illumination extends also to the works of others whom Spicer came to know, including the writers Frank O'Hara, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Helen Adam, Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, Philip K. Dick, Richard Brautigan, and Marianne Moore and the painters Jess, Fran Herndon, and Jay DeFeo. The resulting narrative, an engaging chronicle of the San Francisco Renaissance and the emergence of the North Beach gay scene during the 50s and 60s, will be indispensable reading for students of American literature and gay studies.

Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance

Biographies & Memoirs

Killian, Kevin

Ellingham, Lewis

Arts & Literature

Wesleyan University Press

“Whatever his subject matter, Killian maintains full authority—offering up a homoerotic interpretation of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and a brilliant imagined history of Hank Williams. Here, under the author’s careful control and easygoing charisma, everything seems up for grabs, and almost anything seems possible.”—Time Out New York
Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.

Impossible Princess

Literature & Fiction

United States

City Lights Publishers

Shy: A Novel

Crossing Pr

Bedrooms Have Windows

Amethyst Pr

Over 40 years ago, Andy Warhol promoted the concept that artists are celebrities, just as worthy of portrayal as other cultural icons. Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists begins where Warhol left off. Presenting visually striking and conceptually diverse works in a range of mediums, Likeness is the first exhibition and catalogue to propose a recent history of artists' representations of other artists--of friends, peers, and idols. While any portrait is both a document and a personal record of the relationship between the artist and his or her subject, blurring distinctions between public and private, portraits of artists further enrich the situation; they commemorate and concretize the intimate social dramas of the art world and the economies of exchange. Selected here are over 50 paintings, drawings, photographs, and works in other media, created by a loose network of artists primarily active in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Berlin during the past three decades. Included are works by David Armstrong, AA Bronson, Bruce La Bruce, Chuck Close, Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Richard Hamilton, Mike Kelley, Sean Landers, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Misrach, Dave Muller, Paul Noble, Julian Opie, Elizabeth Peyton, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Wolfgang Tillmans, James Welling, and others.

Likeness: Portraits Of Artists By Other Artists

Arts & Photography

Robbins, David

Tillmans, Wolfgang

Bronson, AA

Dean, Tacita

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

CCA Wattis/ICI, NY

Island Of Lost Souls

Dramas & Plays

Nomados

The Wild Creatures brings together all the stories of Sam D'Allesandro, a young voice whose life was tragically snuffed out at age 31 at the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1988. This new collection includes all of D'Allesandro's published stories (including those first collected in the out-of-print cult classic The Zombie Pit) as well as unpublished stories found among D'Allesandro's papers years after his death by his editor, the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, who worked with the literary estate to create this extended edition of his writing. The Wild Creatures explores a strange terrain of urban legend, the power of sexual obsession, and the thin line where the too-cool becomes the too-hot. Sam D'Allesandro's focused, vivid writing is the stuff of legend: writing so powerful it drags the reader in by the neck.

The Wild Creatures

D'Allesandro, Sam

Short Stories & Anthologies

Suspect Thoughts Pr

Poetry. LGBT Studies. The winner of the first Wonder Prize, Kevin Killian's TWEAKY VILLAGE is a book of poems from a dreamy Oz of delirium and nostalgia, memory and desire. Killian pays homage to the Iraq War dead, George Kuchar, old Hollywood, Kylie Minogue, friends, lovers and almost lovers: "Five years in / to a war that never ends, / I heard telephones, opera house, favorite melodies." Voices from the past—Tim Dlugos, David Bowie, Abraham Lincoln—fade in and out like overheard conversation, half- remembered a dozen years later.

Tweaky Village

Poetry

Wonder

Poetry. TONY GREENE ERA is a new collection of poems by artist, poet, and photographer Kevin Killian, a founding member of the New Narrative movement. Doomed and dizzied by memories of lovers, cities, troubles, stray phrases still audible over a radioed past, these new poems seek a sandcastle San Francisco only to find it slowly dissolving into its past. "How's that going for you," Killian asks in this sharp new book, "racing your destiny, being alone?"

Tony Greene Era

Hustlers gathers a photographic series taken by Los Angeles-based artist Eve Fowler (born 1964) on the streets of the West Village in New York and Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles between 1993 and 1998. Drawing on her background in both journalism and photography, Fowler explores queerness and social "otherness." Here, her untitled, intimate images lay bare the ambiguities of identity, class, sexuality and gender--all of which combine to lend the figure of the hustler a semi-dangerous allure, and the ambiguous attractions of the social outlaw. Stark and unencumbered by typical compositional elements or dramatic lighting, Fowler's subjects demand direct consideration, forcing the viewer to confront in a single face both masculine vulnerability and intrepidity. Accompanying this collection is an essay by Kevin Killian, an award-winning American poet, author and playwright well known for his contributions to LGBT literature.

Eve Fowler: Hustlers

Photography & Video

Capricious

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Books by Killian, Kevin