Poetry. Art. Illustrations by Alex Katz. Printed in Holland in a limited edition of 1,000 copies. Typeface is Cornivus. The portraits were printed duotone. It is a softcover edition, however books are sewn and bound into sturdy covers with a dustjacket. "Katz was inspired to this high-art rogue's gallery by Ratcliff's poetry, which has developed from the often abstract and cunningly sublime work of the early 70s to the more immediately comprehensible jazzy, Hollywood, detective-story ridiculousness--and brilliance--of these later poems.... Katz's portraits make for friendly but shady characters, unknown to the viewer, or maybe hastily recognized. They eerily, lovingly inhabit the poems as gangsters, or victims, or the man on the street, or the poet who came in from the cold, or none of these--just peculiar presence active in the poetic environment. We long for more such collaborations in these rather air-headed days of punk and junk: private harmonies between artist and poet, gone public in a big way"--Gerrit Henry.