"Whatever his subject matter, Killian maintains full authority--offering up a homoerotic interpretation of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and a brilliant imagined history of Hank Williams. Here, under the author's careful control and easygoing charisma, everything seems up for grab[...]

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's in[...]