Jeremy Reed’s Bad Boys rehabilitates some of his personal obsessions with poets and rock musicians into a rich assemblage of challenging, provocative assessments, in which the field of writing, London’s Soho, is also integrated as place into the conceptualisation of the text, as a physical involvement in the work’s dynamic.

From John’s Ashbery’s monumental surprises, to the intransigent figure of Kit Marlowe brawling in St Giles, to Hart Crane’s sensational suicide, Reed partners his themes with unique sensitivities that expand his focus into what are perceptual relationships, extending by poetic design the art of essay writing into the art of thematically acute empathy.

Always the passionate advocate of subcultures, lovers of Jeremy Reed’s poetry and fiction will find in these essays the same quintessential motivations of extraordinary imagination that had JG Ballard, himself the subject of one of these pieces, describe Reed’s talent as almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance.