Beautiful Aliens

Steve Abbott (1943-1992) was a poet, critic, editor, novelist and artist. Abbott was raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, graduated from the University of Nebraska, and attended Emory University where he was an organizer for Atlanta's Gay Liberation Front and the gay lib editor at the underground paper The Great Speckled Bird. Abbott moved to San Francisco in 1974 where he became was a frequent contributor to local publications, including The Advocate, The Sentinel, and the Bay Area Reporter. He was also one of the founding editors of the literary arts newsletter Poetry Flash and the publisher/editor of the literary journal Soup. Steve wrote a number of books of poetry and prose during the 1980s and early 90s including: “Wrecked Hearts”, “Stretching the Agape Bra”, “Lives of the Poets”, “Holy Terror”, “Skinny Trip to a Far Place”, and “View Askew: Postmodern Investigations”, a book that collects Steve's essays from The San Francisco Sentinel, The Advocate, and the arts journal Mirage. He was active in various reading series and discussion groups in the Bay Area, including Cloud House and Small Press Traffic, and, in 1981, he co-organized the historic Left/Write conference. Steve was also a respected critic and the first to use the term "New Narrative" to describe the work of contemporaries including Bruce Boone and Robert Gluck. Abbott died of complications due to AIDS on December 2, 1992. His novel The Lizard Club was published posthumously. Jamie Townsend is a genderqueer poet, publisher, and editor living in Oakland, California. They are half-responsible for Elderly, a publishing experiment and persistent hub of ebullience and disgust. They are the author of several chapbooks including, most recently, Pyramid Song (2018) as well as the full-length collection SHADE (2015). An essay on the history of the New Narrative magazine Soup was published in The Bigness of Things: New Narrative and Visual Culture (2017).

“Poet, journalist, critic, cartoonist and queer radical, Abbott burned bright in the Bay Area scene of the 1970s and ’80s. This vivid collection samples his generous, rangy talents.”—The New York Times"Abbott’s work doesn’t slot neatly into genres or thematic pigeonholes. It’s one indivisible but porous project coterminous with his life… There’s no separation between fact and fiction, fiction and memoir, Abbott as writer and Abbott as subject. The text exists in an intimate, permanent now."—Jeremy Lybarger, 4Columns“Abbott’s work has a freedom and casualness not found in many poets prior to his generation. He’s able to toss off lines like, 'The sky is so full / you hear footsteps on the roof' or drop in a line like, 'So far as I know / Chairman Mao never wore a dress.' It’s his knack for not taking the world too seriously which makes Abbott such an endearing writer. His work is casual, but never sloppy. He’s always precise.”—Mike James, As It Ought To Be Magazine"The loss of Steve Abbott at age 49 to AIDS in 1992 has never been forgotten within the San Francisco poetry community. Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader illuminates what the nagging heartache has been all about. I don’t remember a time when I hadn’t heard of Abbott, even though I know it was well before I’d ever read a word written by him."—Patrick James Dunagan, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars"WHEN STEVE ABBOTT drove his VW bug over the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco in the summer of 1974, there was a palpable queer energy, like a hot wire, running through the City by the Bay… Beautiful Aliens is a selection of Abbott’s essays, fiction, poems, and poetry cartoons, illustrating Abbott’s creative range and versatility."—James Cassell, The Gay & Lesbian Review“It’s a gorgeous collection brimming with Steve Abbott’s wit and insight, highlighting an intelligence lost too soon, as so many were.”—Richard Loranger"Upon opening Beautiful Aliens, it becomes quickly apparent that Abbott’s most abundant talent was in making connections. Abbott edited his own little mag (the influential and vaunted Soup), wrote reviews for Poetry Flash and a variety of gay newspapers, and continued to labor over his own creative pieces, all while having an active love life and raising a daughter as a solo parent during a period when such domestic arrangements were virtually unheard of. It is a testament to his rare talent, then, that so much of his writing is of such a high caliber."—Ted Rees, Full Stop"Abbott’s work through this collection, much of it widely available for the first time, has a wonderful and wild energy to it, moving in multiple directions simultaneously, and jumping from project to project. The book itself is a curious collage of styles and experiments, as Abbott’s literary shifts echoed very clearly the shifts in his own interests and concerns, all with an urgency that moves back and forth from wildly energized to desperate."—rob mclennan"’Death—that’s not the great sadness,’ Steve Abbott writes in his unpublished novel Lost Causes, about Spencer who in his dream realizes ‘hadn’t known until now how much he loved his life… But this sadness also made him horny.’ Reading this sentence for the first time, I was amused. Steve could be philosophical, sensuous, angry, humorous, sarcastic, and candid, but never maudlin. Then I realized how long he has been gone—for nearly thirty years. While his Spencer is definitely a creature of sensation—of “eating, drinking, and fucking”; his waking explorations confirming that he was yet alive, Steve was not just a man of memory and of moment. This collection of his work, Beautiful Aliens—poetry, prose, and essays—proves that his voice has not stopped in time or in death.” —Gabrielle Daniels“Steve Abbott rarely took anything for granted, in style, technique, or what to say. He granted full credibility to the emotional and conceptual shocks and drift of his human experience. This wide-ranging writing follows the laws of one innate, mercurial nature as it conspired with the cross-purposes and contradictions of this world we share with him. The diversions and fascinations within Steve’s life linger here as texts to prompt anyone's reflective, ambivalent self-analysis and engagement.”—Steve Benson"Beautiful Aliens is a book of heart, urgency, intellect, and surprise. Yes, surprise! And not only for those unfamiliar with the writing and the work of this literary powerhouse, but also for those of us who have studied the yellowing pages of out of print books bearing his name. How much more there is to Steve Abbott than any of us could have guessed! Drawing on his experiences within and across communities, Steve Abbott wrote journalism, poetry, and narratives with a complex sympathy, sensitive to shifting cultural tides of the late twentieth century. As optimistic as amethyst, as alluring as his signature shades, as iconic and unexpected as the image of the fallen Tower, these writings assembled thoughtfully by Jamie Townsend are ready to bring down the whole brutish world with a single stab of lightening." —Eric Sneathen“Holy Terror is good reading, well written and extremely knowledgeable about the subject of magic black and white. In fact, all magic is both.”--William Burroughs“Steve Abbott’s Holy Terror is a purgatoria, or rites of scarification, in which innocence can gain be seen to exist most supremely for the glory of its own ritual disembowelment...Abbott is exquisite and the blood he writes with is hisown.”--Diamanda Galas“Holy Terror is an unnervingly precise tampering with one of contemporary literature’s richest and least utilized subjects, religious devotion. Abbott’s characters are telling scavengers in a novel whose borders stretch from the cutting edge of Euro trash depravity to the smokescreen at the heart of Christian myth.”—Dennis Cooper