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Spanning Charles Henri Ford's long and remarkable career, the present volume includes a generous selection of poems gathered from his many groundbreaking books. Ford has been in the advance guard from his precocious beginnings in the Deep South through his experiments in lyrical surrealism in the 1940s up to his recent poetic epiphanies of Nepal. The poet William Carlos Williams once wrote that the effect of Ford's "particularly hard, generally dreamlike poetry. . .is to revive the sense and force them to re-see, re-hear, re-taste, re-smell, and generally re-value all that it was believed had been seen, heard, smelled, and generally valued."

Praised unflinchingly by Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, this stunning work, first published in 1933 by the Obelisk Press, Paris, is a non-judgemental depiction of gay life and men who earn their living there, told through characters like Julian (modeled on Ford) and Karel (based on Tyler).