The best book-publishing story of the year is from Open City in New York.
This Gallimard-inspired, thin blue volume, Long Live a Hunger to Feed Each Other, is a posthumous collection of poems by the little-known and largely-influential poet Jerome Badanes. He was part novelist, filmmaker, antiwar activist, street artist, and teacher (Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, SUNY Purchase). And he was entirely loved.
He died suddenly at fifty-eight in 1995. Some ten years after, his surviving wife and ex-wife and former girlfriend and students and friends worked and raised some five thousand dollars to publish the scarce poems he wrote at the peak of the anti-Vietnam War movement. That’s right, the book was taken on as a tribute paid for by friends and lovers.
These people made the book possible: Jeri Hilderly, Gail Kinn, Kathryn Beam, Kathleen Dow, Thomas Beller, Edward Botts, Marianne Burke, Dorien Grunbaum, Paul Hollister, Carol Japha, Ellen Kozak, Eric Lindbloom, James Lindbloom, Judith Linbloom, Gilbert Levin, Paul Russell, Nancy Willard.
This is why:
Buy this beautiful thing.
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