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Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader
Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader is a landmark collection representing the visionary life’s work of beloved Bay Area luminary Steve Abbott. It brings together a broad cross-section of literary and artistic work spanning three decades of poetry, fiction, collage, comics, essays, and autobiography, including underground classics like, Lives of the Poets and Holy Terror, rare pieces of treasured ephemera, and previously unpublished material, representing a survey of Abbott’s multivalent practice, as well as reinforcing his essential role within the contemporary canon of queer arts.
With an afterword by Alysia Abbott
With an afterword by Alysia Abbott
300 pages, Paperback
First published December 3, 2019
3 people are currently reading
143 people want to read
About the author
Steve Abbott
46 books10 followersSteve Abbott was a Nebraska-born poet, author, cartoonist and critic of primarily LGBT literature. He was also a highly regarded editor. Abbott edited the Bay Area periodical Poetry Flash for many years and the influential SOUP Magazine. In SOUP, he coined the term "New Narrative" to describe the work of Bay Area writers Robert Gluck and Bruce Boone and, with Boone, he organized the historic Left/Write conference in 1981. He was also a single father and many of his early poems reflected on his relationship with his young daughter Alysia Abbott. He died of AIDS in San Francisco in 1992.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 1, 2020
My favorites are probably the early prose pieces, "Lives of the Poets" and "The Malcontent". Like a lot of New Narrative, these are sly, seductive, incomplete glimpses and thoughts, almost overheard rather than carefully recorded. The essays are thoughtful and generous. And while I'm hardly ever in the mood for poetry these days, there are sparkling lines in Abbott's poems, often leaping effortlessly from the stars to the gutter. From "Trying to Fight Sexism with Snapshots as if Occam's razor weren't still a Guillotine" (don't we all wish we came up with that title, eh?):
And from "Some Boys":
(My copy of Abbott's Holy Terror seems to have disappeared. Or did I never own one? Argh. I suppose this is a rather New Narrative turn of events.)
... I think again of pictures how
exciting
if on the back of my next book you'd find a
postcard
snapshot of me electrocuted in Paris
kissing
the plain smelly shoes of Genet.
And from "Some Boys":
Like flies to Easter eggs
were we to the gods.
Moving in for the kill, he said,
"Be a sport."
Even now.
I cannot forget his face.
(My copy of Abbott's Holy Terror seems to have disappeared. Or did I never own one? Argh. I suppose this is a rather New Narrative turn of events.)
December 31, 2019
When will I learn? New Narrative is not for me.
March 26, 2020
I remember liking the Lizard Club and Holy Terror back in the 90s, so I decided to give this collection a try. Alas, much of it consists of poetry (an art form that baffles me), underground comics (which creep me out) and essays pertaining to subjects I don't care about (like poets) or which have grown hopelessly dated (may the blessed saints preserve us from Critical Theory!). The fiction and biographical writing are... uneven, but often interesting. Abbott certainly led an unusual life and writes about a substratum of queer society interesting for its lifestyle experiments, if not its performative edginess. Final verdict: a perfectly fine book, but not my cuppa tea.
October 16, 2024
phenomenal
Read
February 10, 2020So happy to have this volume and to see Steve's innovative and open hearted work back in print.
April 12, 2022
CHILDLIKE PLAYING WITH WORDS
While reading Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, I particularly enjoyed his childlike playing with words and the mischievous glee he took at putting them together in unexpected and paradoxical combinations. The short “(Running) (Graves)” is a good example: “and if words could make a difference / (Batman, Robin— / the whole damn bunch: / Mars, / Venus / . . . / ghost between us) / starfish would swim the sky.” In “Hit by a Space Station,” Steve wonders, “Might aliens on UFOs dream / preferable variants of love?” Later in the poem he asks, “Where would we be without our variant love?” He answers, “The world would shrivel, would die.”
Skinny Trip to a Far Place is Steve’s gentle and humorous account of his trip to Japan with his daughter Alysia. He consistently interrupts his evocative prose with wacky attempts at haiku, for instance, “Alysia and I finally locate a street sign in English. ‘Oike-dori,’ Dad used / to say. Alysia: Does it / intercept with Hunki-dori?’” I adore this “haiku”: “Bugs Bunny — America’s / sexual panic. Whoopee! / No Elmer Fudd.”
In “After Reading Catullus” Abbott writes: “I have run after those boys / they with flippant heads, posing / as gods or sacred wrynecks aflutter.”
The comics included in Beautiful Aliens are fantastic. They brought back memories of surreptitiously reading the Berkely Barb while in the Navy in San Diego in the late 1960s. Is that Mr. Natural next to Mickey and Minnie Mouse in the lower left of one of the panels of “The Vertigo of Loss”? A poetic couch? What a clever satire on poetry readings!
In the previously unpublished essay “My Kid,” Steve’s sexual candor is admirable. He is honest about his drug addiction and how it affects his ability to properly care for his daughter. He describes Alysia’s and his “telepathic participation in nonverbality.” They were a good match for each other.
I assume that “Elegy” is one of Steve Abbott’s most well-known poems. It packs a wallop every time I read it, particularly these lines: “When I learned my wife’s skull was crushed by a truck, my head / swam like an hourglass into a tv set. All the channels went crazy. / Crickets sounded like Halloween noisemakers & I remember explaining / the event / to our 2 year old daughter with the aid of her Babar book.”
In Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (2013), essential reading after Beautiful Aliens, Alysia Abbott reveals that she first learned what really happened to her mother when she was at a reading where her father recited “Elegy.” Alysia had an intense, loving relationship with her talented father. She was a first-hand observer of Steve’s community of writers. She says that she “was aggressively indifferent to Dad’s crowd, all except for a twenty-something writer as handsome as the British rockers whose images wallpapered my room: Sam D’Allesandro.” Later in the book, she writes: “Sam was the first friend we lost: beautiful Sam. He came to my sixteenth birthday party and then disappeared.”
I love Steve Abbott’s work. Abbott was lost to AIDS in 1992 at the age of 49.
While reading Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader, I particularly enjoyed his childlike playing with words and the mischievous glee he took at putting them together in unexpected and paradoxical combinations. The short “(Running) (Graves)” is a good example: “and if words could make a difference / (Batman, Robin— / the whole damn bunch: / Mars, / Venus / . . . / ghost between us) / starfish would swim the sky.” In “Hit by a Space Station,” Steve wonders, “Might aliens on UFOs dream / preferable variants of love?” Later in the poem he asks, “Where would we be without our variant love?” He answers, “The world would shrivel, would die.”
Skinny Trip to a Far Place is Steve’s gentle and humorous account of his trip to Japan with his daughter Alysia. He consistently interrupts his evocative prose with wacky attempts at haiku, for instance, “Alysia and I finally locate a street sign in English. ‘Oike-dori,’ Dad used / to say. Alysia: Does it / intercept with Hunki-dori?’” I adore this “haiku”: “Bugs Bunny — America’s / sexual panic. Whoopee! / No Elmer Fudd.”
In “After Reading Catullus” Abbott writes: “I have run after those boys / they with flippant heads, posing / as gods or sacred wrynecks aflutter.”
The comics included in Beautiful Aliens are fantastic. They brought back memories of surreptitiously reading the Berkely Barb while in the Navy in San Diego in the late 1960s. Is that Mr. Natural next to Mickey and Minnie Mouse in the lower left of one of the panels of “The Vertigo of Loss”? A poetic couch? What a clever satire on poetry readings!
In the previously unpublished essay “My Kid,” Steve’s sexual candor is admirable. He is honest about his drug addiction and how it affects his ability to properly care for his daughter. He describes Alysia’s and his “telepathic participation in nonverbality.” They were a good match for each other.
I assume that “Elegy” is one of Steve Abbott’s most well-known poems. It packs a wallop every time I read it, particularly these lines: “When I learned my wife’s skull was crushed by a truck, my head / swam like an hourglass into a tv set. All the channels went crazy. / Crickets sounded like Halloween noisemakers & I remember explaining / the event / to our 2 year old daughter with the aid of her Babar book.”
In Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (2013), essential reading after Beautiful Aliens, Alysia Abbott reveals that she first learned what really happened to her mother when she was at a reading where her father recited “Elegy.” Alysia had an intense, loving relationship with her talented father. She was a first-hand observer of Steve’s community of writers. She says that she “was aggressively indifferent to Dad’s crowd, all except for a twenty-something writer as handsome as the British rockers whose images wallpapered my room: Sam D’Allesandro.” Later in the book, she writes: “Sam was the first friend we lost: beautiful Sam. He came to my sixteenth birthday party and then disappeared.”
I love Steve Abbott’s work. Abbott was lost to AIDS in 1992 at the age of 49.
Read
January 12, 2021This piece aired worldwide on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.
(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)
Beautiful Aliens
A Steve Abbott Reader
Edited by Jamie Townsend
“Will We Survive the Eighties” is the hypothetical question that titles an essay written by Steve Abbott, a gay man and a leading figure in the 1980s avant-garde literary community based in San Francisco.
In 1992, when attending Naropa University’s creative writing program. I was scheduled to have a one on one critique session with Steve Abbott – but he wasn’t there. He had attended the program and had given a reading and a workshop but had to leave early because he was sick with full blown AIDS.
Nearly three decades later, in 2019, Beautiful Aliens, A Steve Abbott Reader edited by Jamie Townsend was published by Nightboat Books in New York.
Abbott survived the 1980s but just barely. He died in 1992 when he was forty-eight.
Abbott was many things – a poet, critic, novelist, and poetic cartoonist – but as his daughter Alysia Abbott (the author of Fairyland, a memoir about her relationship with her father), writes in the afterward of Beautiful Aliens:
“…his work was about building community. It was about hand-illustrating posters for the readings he organized…..It was about going out and engaging young men and women in classrooms but also in the cafes, bars, and bookstores around San Francisco, sharing his vast knowledge and encouraging them to add their voices to queer culture, in whatever way they could, even if that culture wasn’t getting mainstream attention. He knew how important it was to support voices on the edge, writers that were pushing boundaries and weren’t interested in keeping their readers comfortable.”
I found Beautiful Aliens, a selection of Abbott’s writings, mesmerizing. For one thing, there were so many overlapping areas that we had in common – queer writing conferences that were important to me, and favorite poets and writers such as the lesbian icon Judy Grahn.
I also found that Abbott was a writer who, in so many ways, was ahead of his time, and still has much to tell us. In his prescient essay “Will We Survive the Eighties,” Abbott writes:
“It is clear that what we are doing now … is killing us all. And as we project these attitudes onto other species and towards the Earth’s ecological system, we are jeopardizing our very planet. I would argue that we can no longer afford to see anything – not even ‘gay liberation’ or our survival — as a separate issue needing a separate cultural or a political or a spiritual agenda.
This does not mean I intend to renounce my sexual orientation, far from it. Even in times of sadness or loneliness, it remains my greatest source of strength and joy.”
I found Beautiful Aliens, A Steve Abbott Reader edited by Jamie Townsend, published by Nightboat Books in New York to be that rare thing – a voice from the past that addresses the present.
(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)
Beautiful Aliens
A Steve Abbott Reader
Edited by Jamie Townsend
“Will We Survive the Eighties” is the hypothetical question that titles an essay written by Steve Abbott, a gay man and a leading figure in the 1980s avant-garde literary community based in San Francisco.
In 1992, when attending Naropa University’s creative writing program. I was scheduled to have a one on one critique session with Steve Abbott – but he wasn’t there. He had attended the program and had given a reading and a workshop but had to leave early because he was sick with full blown AIDS.
Nearly three decades later, in 2019, Beautiful Aliens, A Steve Abbott Reader edited by Jamie Townsend was published by Nightboat Books in New York.
Abbott survived the 1980s but just barely. He died in 1992 when he was forty-eight.
Abbott was many things – a poet, critic, novelist, and poetic cartoonist – but as his daughter Alysia Abbott (the author of Fairyland, a memoir about her relationship with her father), writes in the afterward of Beautiful Aliens:
“…his work was about building community. It was about hand-illustrating posters for the readings he organized…..It was about going out and engaging young men and women in classrooms but also in the cafes, bars, and bookstores around San Francisco, sharing his vast knowledge and encouraging them to add their voices to queer culture, in whatever way they could, even if that culture wasn’t getting mainstream attention. He knew how important it was to support voices on the edge, writers that were pushing boundaries and weren’t interested in keeping their readers comfortable.”
I found Beautiful Aliens, a selection of Abbott’s writings, mesmerizing. For one thing, there were so many overlapping areas that we had in common – queer writing conferences that were important to me, and favorite poets and writers such as the lesbian icon Judy Grahn.
I also found that Abbott was a writer who, in so many ways, was ahead of his time, and still has much to tell us. In his prescient essay “Will We Survive the Eighties,” Abbott writes:
“It is clear that what we are doing now … is killing us all. And as we project these attitudes onto other species and towards the Earth’s ecological system, we are jeopardizing our very planet. I would argue that we can no longer afford to see anything – not even ‘gay liberation’ or our survival — as a separate issue needing a separate cultural or a political or a spiritual agenda.
This does not mean I intend to renounce my sexual orientation, far from it. Even in times of sadness or loneliness, it remains my greatest source of strength and joy.”
I found Beautiful Aliens, A Steve Abbott Reader edited by Jamie Townsend, published by Nightboat Books in New York to be that rare thing – a voice from the past that addresses the present.
September 30, 2021
"Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader" is a posthumous collection of his work edited by Jamie Townsend. I read this in conjunction with the memoir, "Fairyland," by his daughter, Alysia Abbott. It was great to have them side by side. Her book is easier to read because it is a cohesive chronological story of their relationship and her experience growing up with her gay poet father. But the two of them together give a bigger story when also reading his work, which I read in patches, not cover to cover.
It helps to see him in perspective of his massive creativity and commitment to living life as an artist. The graphic pages are the hardest to read since they are on a reduced size page.
He did not have to raise his daughter, there were relatives who offered, but he stepped up and managed. He was poor and always needed to work odd jobs, sometimes he earned money through his writing, other times he had to take odd jobs. He was building his reputation as a poet when the AIDS epidemic started.
I'm glad someone gathered his work because he made inroads and should not be forgotten, he lived in the heart of a powerful time of activism for gay rights and when people rallied to help their friends who were dying from AIDS.
It helps to see him in perspective of his massive creativity and commitment to living life as an artist. The graphic pages are the hardest to read since they are on a reduced size page.
He did not have to raise his daughter, there were relatives who offered, but he stepped up and managed. He was poor and always needed to work odd jobs, sometimes he earned money through his writing, other times he had to take odd jobs. He was building his reputation as a poet when the AIDS epidemic started.
I'm glad someone gathered his work because he made inroads and should not be forgotten, he lived in the heart of a powerful time of activism for gay rights and when people rallied to help their friends who were dying from AIDS.
December 2, 2023
randomly stumbled upon this book at b&n and was fascinated with the cover and everything about it, its unique blend of sci-fi and romance is what really captivated me but yet falls short.
I didn’t hate it but didn’t love it.
I didn’t hate it but didn’t love it.
May 31, 2025
I love reading writers much smarter than me. Abbott certainly fits the bill. This book introduced me to a whole new stratum of queer intellectuals. Thank you!
I’d like to read more Abbott in the future.
Note that at times the faggotry became irksome.
I’d like to read more Abbott in the future.
Note that at times the faggotry became irksome.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews