Publisher's Synopsis
This volume brings together for the first time one of the great lost masterworks of 20th Century American poetry. Stuart Z. Perkoff was the archetypal Beat poet, the central figure in the Venice West branch of this movement, where he lived within a maelstrom of jazz, sex, and drugs - all of it illuminated from time to time by flashes of visionary ecstasy. In common with poets like Pound, Olson, Blackburn, and Creeley, Perkoff saw everything that he wrote as part of a continuous poem. From time to time he published bits and pieces of this endless poem, in magazines and in a few small collections. But he was too busy living - and then too busy dying - to bring his work together into a substantial collection. The legend has lingered, however; and now Gerald T. Perkoff has brought together a full collection of his brother's work, in a book revealing that Stuart Z. Perkoff was a great poet not only in his capacity to describe his own tragic life-history, but also in his affirmation of the bonds that draw human beings together, and in his deeply religious sense that human life is a dialogue with - in the words of his last poem, found written on the wall of the room in which he died - "he who must remain unnamed."
