John Farris (1940-2016) was the ultimate gadfly of the New York poetry scene, a universally known and revered genius. Author of the small press novel The Ass’ Tale and poetry collection It’s Not About Time , these Last Poems are his first widely available works. A collection of drawings along with facsimile and transcribed poems from the end of his life, these documents were unearthed by Archway Editions founders Nicodemus Nicoludis and Chris Molnar (who lived next door to Farris during the last years of his life) along with the artist Andrew Castrucci, who founded the Bullet Space Urban Arts Collective. It’s a profound monument to a poet who resolutely lived on the margins, and whose voice is all the more important because of it. It’s some of his best work, short and elegiac but with the unexpected wit and sharpness and kaleidoscopic frame of reference typical of Farris. This is the first collection of many that doubtless will appear from his unpublished, uncollected work, a lifetime’s worth written in defiance of the bullshit, searching for the real unwritten truth – as one poem goes, in its entirety: some- thing’s out there- aft (her the uni-verse). The verse is yet.
