Fear of Dreaming

Carroll a diarist and rock performer is best known for his coming-of-age memoir <i>The Basketball Diaries</i> 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. <p/>This volume of poetry collects selections from Jim Carroll's <i>Living at the Movies</i> which was published in 1973 when he was twenty-two and <i>The Book of Nods</i> released in 1986. <i>Fear of</i> <i>Dreaming </i>also includes pieces previously unpublished in book form including Curtis's Charm a vignette set in New York City's Central Park about a man convinced he is a victim of black magic and poetic tributes to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. <p/> 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 <i>San Francisco Chronicle Book Review</i>