Night Shift (Unbearable Books / Autonomedia) - Softcover

Ron Kolm (born 1947) is an American poet, editor, activist and bookseller, based in New York City. Kolm came to New York in 1970 and got a job at the Strand bookstore, where he worked with Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith. During this period he became friends and colleagues with a group of writers who would come to exemplify the "Downtown" scene of the 1970s and 80s. In 1985, Kolm co-founded the Unbearables, a loose collective of poets and artists who took their name from a short story by Mike Golden. Historian Robert Siegle describes Kolm as "an editor and facilitator for magazines and presses as well as a writer of fiction and poetry" who "carried boxes of little magazines around to bookstores, passed around copies of new work, and connected people" in general, noting that "wherever we look along the networks that hold together the diverse creative talents who constitute this cultural revolution, we find Kolm."

Ron Kolm's Night Shift stands alongside other wage-slave masterpieces like Charles Bukowski's Factotum and Harvey Pekar's American Splendor. Winking and grinning in the face of punch-clock death, Kolm finds a way to somehow stay alive and even to eventually triumph. One senses in these moving and sometimes hilarious little vignettes that Kolm wrote them in flagrante dilecto; a gypsy moth blue collar poet-scholar recording his emergence from sooty cocoon to winging oracle of the smokestacks, junkyards, tenements and roads of the national creep-scape. Alan Kaufman, author of Drunken Angel; editor of The Outlaw Bible of American Literature --Back cover

Kolm has always been a true NYC poet, with a sensitive urbanity and absurdist humor that barely looks both ways as taxis filled with rich yupsters swerve around downwardly mobile moppets with new wave beards. His is a voice that realizes the foreverness of beat vision. Where we all come together to love the noise of the great metropolis we are lucky to have this guy in the room. Thurston Moore, author of Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture and Stereo Sanctity - Lyrics & Poems --Back cover

Ron Kolm is an American original and Night Shift is a testament to a life lived in the margins which is where the real action has always been. Wise, ribald, human, unexpectedly soulful, these stories have the grit and rhythm of real life as filtered through a sensibility finely tuned to the absurd and comic. Michael Lindgren reviews for the Brooklyn Rail, L Magazine and Rain Taxi --Back cover