This Will Kill That — Gerard Malanga | Sparrow 66 (Black Sparrow Press, 1978)

Description

Issued as Sparrow 66, This Will Kill That is an early, self-contained poetic sequence by Gerard Malanga, preceding the expanded book-length version published by Black Sparrow Press in 1983. Typical of the Sparrow series, the work reflects John Martin’s commitment to spare design, strong typography, and presenting a single author in a focused, intimate format. Malanga’s poems here are reflective, spare, and quietly philosophical—concerned with language, perception, clarity, and the fragility of meaning itself. The piece reads less as a performance than as a reckoning, attentive to silence as much as statement.

Malanga is best known for his central role in Andy Warhol’s Factory, where he served as collaborator, assistant, dancer, poet, and chronicler during Warhol’s most influential period of the 1960s. While his association with Warhol often dominates discussion, Malanga’s independent literary career is substantial, and This Will Kill That stands as evidence of his seriousness as a poet apart from the Factory mythology. Black Sparrow’s decision to publish him places Malanga squarely within the press’s broader orbit of postwar American poetry—alongside figures like Bukowski, Creeley, and Reznikoff—where precision, restraint, and voice mattered more than spectacle.

A clean, thoughtfully designed Black Sparrow publication—an essential crossover piece for collectors of Warhol-era ephemera, Beat-adjacent poetry, and small-press American literature.