Edited by Sabrina Tarasoff. Contributions by Jack Skelley, Sheree Rose, Chiara Moioli, David Trinidad, Dodie Bellamy, and Dennis Cooper.
The first complete collection of Bob Flanagan’s poetry.
Bob Flanagan (1952-1996) was an American poet and performance artist known for his work on sadomasochism and lifelong struggle with cystic fibrosis. Flanagan's first volumes came into being in the context of a small contemporary poetry and art scene orbiting the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, CA in the early 1980s, which included poets and writers such as Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Ed Smith, Jack Skelley, and David Trinidad, amongst others. Flanagan's body of work came to occupy a unique position within their cohort as the poems evoked a personal vocabulary of illness, death and restraint through the poet's edgy, endearing, quirky sense of humor and mischievous spirit. Spirit Halloween, Americana, and pop culture act as the inexpressible backdrop for a performative, comic poetic practice in close dialogue with poets such as Charles Bukowski, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Ron Koertge. Though a portion of the work remains unfinished in the wake of Flanagan's death in 1996, the legacy left by these poems is undoubtedly one of the more important, surprising, heartbreaking, wacky, and profoundly original contributions to American verse of the period.
- Kristina Kite Gallery & Pep Talk, 2024
- Softcover, 170 pages
- 6 x 10 inches
