Jess Cotton is an Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. She writes on twentieth-century literature, with a particular interest in poetry after 1945, psychoanalysis, feminism and the practices of reading.

Cotton’s short but thorough explication of Ashbery’s life and work does a fine job of placing him both as a 20th-century poet and as a leading figure among gay writers. The book is part of a series that includes scores of biographies focused on the writer’s work, including well-known gay writers such as Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, Yukio Mishima, Marcel Proust, Susan Sontag, and Tennessee Williams. - Alan Contreras, The Gay and Lesbian ReviewJohn Ashbery is one of the most original and inventive poets of the post-war era. Jess Cotton deftly interweaves the evolution of his utterly distinctive poetic idiom into a wide-ranging and illuminating account of his life and times. Beautifully illustrated with numerous photographs never previously published, this volume offers a concise and eloquent introduction to a poet whose commitment to experimentation and ear for everyday speech gloriously expanded the possibilities of American poetry. - Mark Ford, Professor of English, UCL, and editor of John Ashbery: Collected PoemsJess Cotton's acute new critical biography shows how Ashbery’s poetry was a collage of everything his imagination loved, from quiz shows to queer New York, Rimbaud to nursery rhymes. Her own deft collaging of quotations from unpublished poems, diaries, letters and memoirs reveals what an intensely serious and self-aware artist he was from adolescence to old age, and will delight Ashbery fans both established and starting out. - Jeremy Noel-Tod, editor of The Penguin Book of the Prose PoemJess Cotton's biography offers a lucid, perceptive, compulsively readable account of John Ashbery's life and poetry. It attends to how Ashbery's writing refracted the huge artistic, political and social upheavals of the decades he lived through, and explores sensitively the complexities of his own personality. It's an essential introduction to one of the major figures of postwar poetry. - Oli Hazzard, author of John Ashbery and Anglo-American Exchange