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New and Selected Poems 1964-2000

In 1964, at age 21, Gerard Malanga was already the celebrity poet-photographer-Golden Boy of Andy Warhol’s Factory; he’d starred in Warhol movies and his poetry had appeared in such prestigious literary magazines as Poetry, Art & Literature, Partisan Review and The New Yorker. This monumental retrospective volume includes all the major highlights of Malanga’s previously published work plus many new or rediscovered poems appearing here in book form for the first time. A poetic testament spanning almost four decades, No Respect confirms Malanga’s place in our recent literary history.

From the glamorous, sophisticated mid-Sixties “Fashion Poems” to the elegiac, ruminative Nineties “Memory’s Snapshots,” these glittering, multifaceted lyric pieces arrest our attention with their beautiful reflective surfaces. Ever inspired by his other art, photography, Malanga casts subtly oblique shadows that linger on the imagination’s lens (“I am a camera/recording”); this collection is the defining work of one of the great poetic voices of our day, of the Sixties, and everything in between.

Gerard Malanga, a longtime member of the New York avant-garde movement, was born in the Bronx and attended Manhattan’s School of Industrial Art. He was introduced to poetry by his twelfth-grade English teacher and continued to study poetry at the Cincinnati College of Art and Design, but he dropped out in less than a year. He later attended Wagner College on a scholarship anonymously donated for the express purpose of advancing his poetic career. During the summer of his second year at Wagner, he was hired as an assistant by Andy Warhol. Malanga dropped out of Wagner the following semester to be able to work with Warhol full-time. He helped Warhol produce screenprints and acted in many of his movies, including Bufferin (1967), in which he reads some of his own poetry. In addition to poetry, Malanga has produced several books of photography, the most famous of which are nudes of prominent people such as Iggy Pop.