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.
