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Kevin Killian—the puckish poet, playwright, novelist, scholar, and impresario of the Bay Area arts community—channeled the charisma of the pop stars. Pulled from his legendary corpus, and long out of print, the work collected here is the record of Killian’s life as a radical littérateur. In Argento Series, Killian conjures the horror, suspense, and cinematic imagery of director Dario Argento as he documents the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. In Action Kylie, he revels in queer identity and the universal love of fandom. In Tweaky Village and Tony Greene Era, Killian elevates artists and friends to legendary status within his personal pantheon. And Elements, Killian’s wink at the periodic table, makes its U.S. debut.
The collection features an introduction by Kay Gabriel, who writes of Killian’s “fabulous, permissive body of work, charming, filthy and smarmy at turns, with its retchable milk enemas and its devilish twists.”
“Kevin loved culture and was its constant undoing.”
—Eileen Myles
“I used to say Kevin was the only person I ever knew who possibly could have come from a different planet—an enigma who possessed superhuman knowledge, baffling productivity, and later, super-human kindness.”
—Robert Glück
"The four hundred pages of Padam Padam, carefully curated by Evan Kennedy and Jason Morris, are but a smattering of Kevin Killian’s life work, yet they’re ample enough to show his brilliant, hungry mind develop over the decades, spinning up new universes, sometimes enjambed but always brainy and sexual."
—Daniel Allen Cox, The Brooklyn Rail
"Killian—a figure in San Francisco’s New Narrative movement, alongside writers such as Kathy Acker and Robert Glück—saved his biggest celebrity obsession, however, for Kylie Minogue. She ran through his work like letters in a stick of rock . . . Padam Padam [is] a new collection of Killian’s work that pays obvious homage to Kylie’s 2023 hit of the same name."
—Michael Cragg, The Guardian
“Like his beloved Kylie Minogue sings, Kevin created a body of work that is "more than [we] dare to think about"—a "dark secret" that filled and felt "the need," a deep need, in all of us.”
—Dorothea Lasky
Like Acker, Glück and Bellamy, Killian’s writing interweaves found text, literary canon and pop culture with the personal and diaristic . . . For anyone who has cultivated a mistrust of the weighty topics considered poetry-worthy, Killian is a bracing ally.
—Andrew Spragg, The Poetry Review