Detroit: Stories - Softcover

Working on this volume is curator Michelle Perron, and fiction writer, Peter Markus. Among the contents: works--many of them previously unpublished--by the late poet Jim Gustafson; a memoir by Chris Tysh of her good friend, the late painter Elizabeth Murray; an interview with the writer Gary Lutz; stories by Noy Holland and Robert Lopez; and Dennis Nawrocki's take on recent history at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

"This healthy volume of Detroit's major modern artists contains a superb section of work by Jim Gustafson, edited by Michelle Perron. Gustafson was a great poet who created a prodigious body of work between 1975-1996, when he died young of a brain aneurysm. An oversized personality with immense charm, Jim was simultaneously "a riot among friends" (as Jeffrey Miller, whose work Jim edited post-mortem said, describing his own michigander self), and a very serious writer who probed the language for secrets that yielded music. Gustafson published only a few slim volumes in his lifetime, a scarcity that can be attributed to his integrity and justified sense of self-worth. His poetry is just now beginning its ascent, and its astonished beauties are becoming visible to a new generation; there are new collections in the offing. His letters alone are anthologizable. Detroit, the city where Jim was born and where he died, after many perregrinations and sojourns in the bohemias of San Francisco and New York, was a source for both his toughness and his tenderness. "Detroit just sits there/ like the head of a dog on a serving platter.../ Detroit means lovers buying matching guns..." ("The Idea of Detroit"). Jim was also my friend and our adventures together would make a terrific book of stories, a claim that many of his friends might rightly make. He had a gift for friendship, and a generous and profligate nature that markes us all deeply. --Andrei Codrescu, Exquisite Corpse