The first complete collection of Bob Flanagan’s poetry, edited by Sabrina Tarasoff and with contributions by Jack Skelley, Sheree Rose, Chiara Moioli, David Trinidad, Dodie Bellamy, and Dennis Cooper.

Available now!

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Cause for celebration: Bob Flanagan’s tortured, elegant poetry is finally back in print! Alive with carnality, love, abjection, relentless self-exposure and fatalist laughs, these poems are as fresh and stunning as when they were first written. Bob's work lays bare the eroticism of punishment and the punishing possibilities of the erotic. Every meticulously chosen word between these covers drips with blood, cum and tears.

~Amy Gerstler, author of Index of Women, Bitter Angel, and Early Heaven

Bob Flanagan takes the scalpel of poetry, sectioning the veins of humanity's plea for every soar and dissolution, replacing liters of blood and its liquid memory with purple wine. We have no chance of escaping the lores and laws of existence, so it would seem; how to put our back into living, exsanguinate phenomenal eternities? Fun To Be Dead is a rhapsodic intubation of love, breathlessness, and despair slid between linen sheets cracked in bleach, wheezing lungs, salted skin, and moonshine light years and centuries ahead. Whistling new tunes of prospect with chapped lips, turning tricks with prose on fleek, as lungs drown in fading time: the dimming duration of cystic fibrosis Flanagan handled with kid gloves and cynical, elegiac resolution. Fun To Be Dead chapters all the luminescent ties and appetites we hold to earth and those we don't, bleeding humor and sagacity over cold tiled floors in lilac liquid mercury. Which is to say, his otherworldly cosmos, planetary alignments filled with affection and incursion form a brilliant collection of breathy abnegation that charges us with lack and anticipation. Fun To Be Dead is sky and leaves: my newfound amulet.

~Estelle Hoy, author of Pisti 

Bob Flanagan makes me sick and I love it. Is there a right way to be ill? I dunno. Probably you’re meant to keep quiet or frighten anybody too much, just be a strung-out angel in waiting, please. This is very much fucking not what Bob Flanagan did. He took his wrecked body, his pain, his urges and, yup, his death, everything that he was supposed to keep to himself, and he turned it into work that’s ferociously alive, hilarious, strange. In these poems, he’s singing to you in the back of the ambulance while the dogs prowl outside and ‘the sky glows orange like a match.’ It’s beautiful, it hurts. 

~Charlie Fox, author of This Young Monster

I think of Artaud when I read Bob Flanagan’s poetry. Artaud had no choice but to use his madness/sickness to make his art, and the same with Flanagan. To do his poetry/performances, he had to move through his physical pain. Yet he kept his humor and charm throughout the process. On many levels, I think of him and his work as poetry on a Saint level. I don’t have that many heroes in my life, but I know if I follow The Bob, Sainthood is not that far off.

~Tosh Berman, author of Sparks-Tastic and Tosh

As an upgraded Culture Wars casts its shadow across the land, a veteran combatant rises from the dead. Conservative-baiting performance artist and ‘supermasochist’ Bob Flanagan emerges in this collection as an extraordinary writer, whose work is suspended between tenderness and violence, gravity and glee, and palpitates with the quintessence of the quick. Cometh the hour, cometh the man: it’s Bob o’clock.

~Diarmuid Hester, author of Wrong and Nothing Ever Just Disappears