A posthumous celebration of the poet and provocateur Kevin Killian, Padam Padam pulses with camp, pop culture, and pleasure.Kevin Killian—the puckish poet, playwright, novelist, scholar, and impresario of the Bay Area arts community—channeled the charisma of the pop stars. Pulled from his legendary corpus, and long out of print, the work collected here is the record of Killian’s life as a radical littérateur. In Argento Series, Killian conjures th...

“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 YorkImpossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based...

At last a major anthology of New Narrative, the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to change writing forever.In the twenty years that followed America’s bicentennial, narrative writing was re-formed, reflecting new political and sexual realities. With the publication of this anthology, the New Narrative era bounds back to life, ripe with dramatic propulsion and infused with the twin strains of poetry and continental theory. The r...

"An extraordinary collection . . . Like the work of Emily Dickinson and W. B. Yeats, Spicer's poems still seem to come from somewhere else." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)Winner of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Award for Poetry (2009)Winner of the American Book Award (2009)In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts an...

The more than 300 letters collected in Even Strange Ghosts Can Be Shared are a crucial component of Jack Spicer's unique oeuvre, and they radiate with the brilliance, ferocity, and vulnerability that characterizes his poetry. Spicer writes tenderly to lovers and friends in self-reflective series that recall the poetic sequences in My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Letters to elders like Charles Olson and Ezra Pound and to poetic collaborat...

A book-length selection from Kevin Killian's legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com.An enchanting roll of duct tape. Love Actually on Blu-ray Disc. The Toaster Oven Cookbook, The Biography of Stevie Nicks, and an anthology of poets who died of AIDS. In this only book-length selection from his legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com, sagacious shopper Kevin Ki...

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later, Spicer's voice is more compelling, insistent...

This all-new book, by the co-author of Companion, invites you to discover and enjoy your poetic self.Inspired by the gratifying success of Companion, Kim Addonizio presents exciting new insights into the creative process, craft, and the lessons of her own creative subjects--love, loss, identity, community--are here, along with a heady variety of writing exercises (and innovative ways to use the Internet). Chapters on gender, race, and class challenge readers to ex...

"If readers would like to sample the genius and diversity of American poetry in the last century, there's no better place to start." — World Literature TodayWhen Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door—William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in its first years, Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan in 2011. And at ...

One of America's most influential writing teachers offers writing lessons we can draw from twenty-five great texts.Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made.In The Art of X-Ray Reading, Clark invites you to don your X-ray reading glasses and join him on a guided tour through s...

“Esolen signals with this book his presence in the top rank of authors of cultural criticism.” —American SpectatorPlay dates, soccer practice, day care, political correctness, drudgery without facts, television, video games, constant supervision, endless distractions: these and other insidious trends in child rearing and education are now the hallmarks of childhood. As author Anthony Esolen demonstrates in this elegantly written, often wickedly fu...

Short offers the tradition and glorious present of these popular forms that stretch and defy genre. From 1500 to present, hundreds of pieces. Inventive, entertaining, and addictive.Short prose forms are elusive to define--one writer's prose poem is another's flash fiction or brief essay. Rather than quibble, Short opts for inclusiveness. Here is a dazzling array: 100s of pieces (under 1250 words) from 24 Western countries, written over five centur...