Carroll, a diarist and rock performer, is best known for his
coming-of-age memoir The Basketball Diaries, which became an instant
classic when it was first published in 1978 and then a national
bestseller when a film version of the book was released in 1995. Carroll
initially made his reputation as a poet, and has won acclaim and
comparisons to everyone from Rimbaud to Frank O'Hara for his delicate
yet hallucinatory imagery.
This volume of poetry collects selections from Jim Carroll's Living at
the Movies, which was published in 1973 when he was twenty-two, and
The Book of Nods, released in 1986. Fear of Dreaming also includes
pieces previously unpublished in book form, including "Curtis's Charm,"
a vignette set in New York City's Central Park about a man convinced he
is a victim of black magic, and poetic tributes to Robert Mapplethorpe
and Ted Berrigan.
"His poems' urgent, obsessive metaphors pose tensely against their cool,
streetwise surface voice, charging them with an electricity that's at
once disturbing, sexual, religious, and psychological."--Tom Clark, San
Francisco Chronicle Book Review