A new collection of work, some never seen before, by a forgotten queer poet of the mid-twentieth century. This collection draws from Harry Fainlight’s memoirs, unpublished work, and other biographical pieces to create a provocative portrait of the artist.
Born in New York and raised in England before returning to the Lower East Side in the early 1960s, by the age of thirty Harry Fainlight had cruised with Ginsberg, boozed with Kerouac, and posed for Warhol, all the while managing to feud with everyone from Robert Graves to Ted Hughes. Amidst it all Fainlight wrote some of the most startling verse of his generation, fusing queer longing and Jewish mysticism with a sardonic and hesitant eye. Fainlight’s pioneering explorations of queer urban life are as boldly alluring as they are intimate and vulnerable, and yet for decades his work has been largely inaccessible to readers.
Rhyming and Necromancy is a new collection that gathers all of Fainlight’s published poems, including those from the only collection published in his lifetime Sussicran, as well as a number of previously unpublished poems. Together, they give a sense of the extraordinary scope of Fainlight’s mind; his fraught explorations of self and society; and the insight of a singular poet destined to find revelation in the margins of life.
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