NO RESPECT: New and Selected Poems 1964–2000

This 19th collection of poems from Malanga, the former Warhol Factory star and longtime photographer, gathers 36 years worth of poetry, much of it previously unpublished. Malanga's early work ranges from Ashbery-influenced image jamming to meditations on beauty and emptiness as filtered through fabulousness: "But why must they always/ Annihilate something/ Beautiful in themselves/ By misunderstanding my good/ Intentions to help them look/ After themselves?" Malanga clearly writes with a photographer's eye, with many of his poems seemingly inspired or written directly (and often intentionally flatly) out of photographic images: "the confusion of headlights/ Crossing each other are not/ Off in the eyes in the night,/ Exposure keeps corrupting every lifeline./ The May issue of French Vogue carries a cover of Deborah Dixon." However, like many of his contemporaries from the Factory and the earliest incarnations of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, Malanga often uses friendship and personal iconography as an emotional grid upon which his poems are set: "John rolls a joint and thinks/ About what time the mail is due to arrive/ Rene wraps himself up in a bedsheet/ Benedetta calls to let me know when to call her tonight." Malanga's later work, including a short section of poems written in and about the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, moves toward the elegiac, as the names from Malanga's poems start to fade: "so this is half a poem/ not existing. So this is Bill speaking,/ so this is not quite finished,/ not quite begun./ 'All past is fiction.'/ The cut-ups are drifting away." Despite the wry title, Malanga deserves recognition for nearly 40 years of obsessive documentation and genuine poetic invention. (Oct.)

Forecast:As one of a dwindling number of Factory survivors, Malanga still makes for good copy, especially given the plethora of Warhol books coming this fall (from Wayne Koestenbaum and Annette Michaelson, among others). University libraries will add this title as Warholiana, but poets and others interested in the era will pick it up for its wonderfully versified dish.