Freak Wonder: Collected Poems

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.