Seventy-seven contributors from New York City's downtown bohemian beat offer the most searing, scandalous and scurrilous denunciations of fellow wri8ters ever to appear in print! Innovative, free-form and traditional literary reviews of texts from the Bible and James Joyce's Ulysses to Borges, Calvino and David Sedaris, from Luc Sante, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Jim Knipfel, Carl Watson, Richard Kostelanetz, David Ulin, Sharon Mesmer, and many more. Profusely illustrated with dozens of images and with 16 pages of full-color art.
Ron Kolm (born 1947) 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.
During this period he became friends and colleagues with a group of writers who would come to exemplify the "Downtown" scene of the 1970s and 80s ("Downtown" in this context means anything below Fourteenth Street in Manhattan). In 1985, Kolm, Bart Plantenga, Mike Golden, Max Blagg and Peter Lamborn Wilson founded the Unbearables, a loose collective of poets and artists based on the precepts of Hakim Bey, as set forth in his seminal book, TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone). They took their name from a short story by Mike Golden. Their first reading series was at the Life Cafe in the East Village. They later read or performed their work at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, Gathering of Tribes and the Bowery Poetry Club. Their usual targets are literary cliches, which they attempt to deconstruct with humor.
Kolm has been one of the editors of their anthologies: Unbearables (1995), Crimes of the Beats (1998), Help Yourself! (2002) and The Worst Book I Ever Read (2009) all published by Autonomedia. Kolm's own publications include The Plastic Factory (1989, Red Dust), Welcome to the Barbecue (Low-Tech Press, 1990) and Rank Cologne (P.O.N. Press, 1991). His work can also be found, along with the other Unbearables, in the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1999), and in Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York's Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (New York University Press, 2006). He has collaborated on a novel, Neo Phobe, written with Jim Feast (Unbearable Books, 2006).
Historian Robert Siegle describes Kolm as "an editor and facilitator for magazines and presses as well as a writer of fiction and poetry" who "carried boxes of little magazines around to bookstores, passed around copies of new work, and connected people" in general, noting that "wherever we look along the networks that hold together the diverse creative talents who constitute this cultural revolution, we find Kolm." (Suburban Ambush, Johns Hopkins Press, 1989)
The Ron Kolm papers (some 35 cartons of correspondence, notebooks, objects, chapbooks, signed first editions and runs of literary magazines) were purchased by the Fales Library at New York University, where they now reside. The Finding Aid to the Ron Kolm Papers is available online: The Ron Kolm Papers
The Unbearables, who presently include writers Jim Feast, Carol Wierzbicki, Bonny Finberg, Carl Watson, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Jill Rapaport, Mike Topp, Michael Carter, Shalom Neuman and many others, continue to publish and perform in a variety of configurations and venues.
