Freak Wonder: The Collected Poems of Jim Brodey

The master of ecstatic, otherworldly digression, Jim Brodey, is finally back in print, in a book edited to perfection! In the 1990s, we read his poems at AIDS fundraisers because his words pulled everyone into the love of a makeshift family when we needed him most! The generosity and beauty of this book’s arrangement and design honor Brodey’s extraordinary life and work for new generations of the wild, queer transcendence!

The posthumous publication of Jim Brodey’s last poems reveals a poet rather different than the fellow I met. It is a clear illustration, were one needed, of how a great gift sometimes transcends the needs and fractures of the body or mind.

He writes with a rich, disturbing kind of balance—his poems are frequently raunchy enough to ease you into accepting their nearly religious sweetness. Few poets can comfortably speak in such lofty tones. Brodey can actually make you believe it.

Certain artists . . . have been nearly suppressed and their technical innovations and linguistic turns attributed to later dogmatists. Brodey is one of these significant poets. He took Frank O’Hara’s empirical personism, collaborated, as it were, with the jazzy autotelic clusters of Clark Coolidge and Ceravolo, and finally emerged before his death from AIDS with synthetic, satirical, muscular elegies of a late turbulence. His poetry is wildly erotic and convincingly strange. . . . With this volume, the independent, alarming, and expansive Brodey makes a permanent appearance.

Blessed be the intimate cosmic vocabularied yawp of wild flying crab language devoted to the depths of friendship and despair, love and loneliness, sex and music—the pure scale of fabled velvet weirdnesses in the profoundly populated poems of Jim Brodey, whose fantastically moving body of Freak Wonder is finally re-released into a hopefully deserving world.