Review of Fear of Dreaming by Benjamin Segedin – Jim Carroll Book Reviews – CatholicBoy.com

Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems of Jim Carroll

Review by Benjamin Segedin
Booklist 90.4 (15 Oct. 1993): 412

Carroll, Jim. Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems
of Jim Carroll. Nov. 1993. 292p. Penguin, paper, $12.50 (0-14-058695-4).
Galley 811′.54 [BKL]

At 22, Carroll, already acclaimed for his Basketball Diaries,
published his first collection of poems, Living at the Movies
(1973), written in a brand of free verse at once hallucinatory
and sharply focused. Touching, disturbing, and deeply personal,
Carroll mines Catholic symbolism and mean-street and drug imagery
with poignant intensity. In The Book of Nods (1985), his
second collection, prose poems paying an acknowledged debt to
Rimbaud depict urgent desperation in New York City and California.
Penguin here combines Carroll’s two earlier collections with some
more recent poems and a vignette titled “Calvin’s Charm” [sic].
Meanwhile, Carroll is also known for three rock n’ roll albums.