Padam Padam: The Collected Poems, Kevin Killian

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Padam Padam: The Collected Poems
by Kevin Killian (Paperback – November 4, 2025)
Edited by Evan Kennedy & Jason Morris | Introduction by Kay Gabriel

A dazzling, posthumous celebration of one of queer literature’s most mischievous and magnetic voices.

Kevin Killian—poet, playwright, novelist, scholar, and legendary figure of San Francisco’s queer arts scene—was a writer of infectious wit, erotic boldness, and camp brilliance. Padam Padam gathers his most iconic and out-of-print works, tracing a career that merged the intimate with the outrageous, the personal with the political.

From the horror-glamour meditations of Argento Series, which confronts the AIDS epidemic through the lens of Italian cinema, to Action Kylie, a sparkling tribute to pop iconography and queer devotion, Killian’s poems pulse with sensuality, grief, and humor. Tweaky Village and Tony Greene Era transform the friendships and art of a generation into an ecstatic mythology, while Elements—making its U.S. debut—showcases Killian’s genius for alchemy between the erotic and the intellectual.

With an introduction by poet Kay Gabriel, who celebrates Killian’s “fabulous, permissive body of work—charming, filthy, and smarmy at turns, with its retchable milk enemas and devilish twists,” Padam Padam is both a memorial and a manifesto: a testament to queer desire, pop culture devotion, and the irreverent spirit of a poet who lived—and wrote—without apology.