Divine Comedy

by Ron Kolm

Collection of poetry by downtown poet Ron Kolm, co-founder of the Unbearables literary collective.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published May 7, 2013

About the author

Ron Kolm is an American poet, editor, activist and bookseller, based in New York City. Kolm came to New York in 1970 and got a job at the Strand bookstore, where he worked with Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith

Reviews

[Michael Lindgren]

The poet, editor, impresario, and activist Ron Kolm has been a central figure on the downtown literary scene since the mid-1970s, when he was one of a coterie of writers and booksellers who rotated around the now-legendary Strand / Eighth Street Books / CBGBs axis. Kolm went on to co-found the notorious anarchist literary collective the Unbearables, where he has acted as editor and anthologist for a series of counter-hierarchical literary endeavors of varying scope and impact, and is currently associate editor of the (now online-only) famed Evergreen Review. The publication of Divine Comedy represents the clicking into place of the final facet of Kolm's multivalent career, and an elegy of sorts for a dirtier, randier, tougher lost city. Divine Comedy consists of a series of brief lyrics describing, with acerbic humor, the misadventures in sex and love and literature of a sensitive-but-fearless poet-narrator at sea in the whirlwind of the New York City demimonde in all its seedy glamour. An essential, era-defining work; a classic of rough'n'ready alternative literature.