Richard Milazzo is a critic, curator, publisher, independent scholar and poet.

He is a graduate of McBurney School (’68) and Franklin and Marshall College (’72). In the 1970s, he earned an M.A. for his thesis on Ezra Pound’s Cantos at City College of New York. He was accepted in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to pursue a doctoral degree in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York in 1977, but attended instead City University from 1977 to 1980, “where he studied theories of formal systems,” mostly in the fields of logic and literature.

Taken from a forthcoming autobiographical text, We Are All Beautifully Damaged, about his education, the author writes: “Basically, I saw my formal education mostly as a way out – of the Housing Projects – and all that went with that. At Franklin and Marshall College, I studied the Russian and East European avant-garde with Samuel E. Allen, a Professor of History and a profoundly gay, eloquent, brilliant Black man from Virginia who knew an abundance of languages fluently (among them Russian and French) – many of whose ontological features were not exactly prescribed at the time, those being predominantly the fact that he was gay, Black, from the South, and who was not only outspoken but whose every speech act, from the smallest syllable to the most complex of syntactical utterances, was glamorously orchestrated –, and who I believe may have been among the earliest casualties of AIDS at the very beginning of the ’80s. But I believe my truest and deepest education came in the form of picking off the college bookstore shelves any book published by Grove Press and New Directions, but particularly Grove during those four years living in isolation in Lancaster, Pa. With the exception of Peter R. Young, a Chinese-American and a librarian at Franklin & Marshall, who was a Vietnam War vet and who eventually became Chief of the Asian Division at the Library of Congress and the best man at my wedding in 1982, and a very few fellows (F&M at the time was an all-boys institution) I can hardly recall, the authors of Grove Press were my closest companions. You cannot imagine the honor and pleasure it was, so many years later, for me to become close friends with Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press, a precious friendship that would last for the last twenty or so years of his life.

“After living in Minneapolis – an absurd thing to do, because it was where Robert Zimmerman was born and John Berryman, the great contemporary sonneteer, who died by throwing himself off a bridge – and Chicago briefly (because I had had enough of New York City, but couldn’t risk not living in a big city), and in Boston for nearly two years (where I ‘lived’ in the Museum of Fine Arts library, studying the history of Modern Art on my own, wrongly disdaining the work of Robert Lowell, who would die only a few years later, in 1977, and favoring instead the more rarefied aesthetic of Rainer Maria Rilke), I graduated from City College of New York, but not without becoming obsessed with Wittgenstein’s broomstick philosophy of cleaning house, and studying still another sonneteer, Guido Cavalcanti (Dante’s sidekick), and writing my thesis on Ezra Pound’s Cantos, despite having studied with Alfred Kazin, whom I admired begrudgingly, having worn his ideology on his sleeve. At Columbia University, I audited several courses, unofficially, including one on Celine and depravity taught by Julia Kristeva. I had what was an abiding affection for Columbia, even though I knew that it was, along with New York University (whose library I lived in), one of the worst slum lords in the city.”

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“At City University, I studied theories of formal systems relating to logic and allegory with Professors Raymond Smullyan and Angus Fletcher, respectively, although the magical games of chess and mathematics seemed forever to allude me. Nevertheless, apart from his anti-semitism and his paranoia, Bobby Fischer’s ‘two pawns to the side’ and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, like the writings of the pre-Socratics, fueled my imagination, as did Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle at the time. (I think they still do.) I’m not sure Professor Smullyan was an albino, but his hair and features were as long and white as a snowdrift, and he seemed to come down from a mountain in upstate New York (or some similar god-forsakened place), like Nietszche’s Zarathustra, to teach us, in the world below, in the benighted pornography- and drug-riddled district of 42nd St. and Times Square; and Professor Fletcher’s ideas and speech intonations were so mesmering I hardly noticed how utterly Celtic he was. He, too, seemed to have descended from some higher place to instruct us in the mysterious ways of an Unworld.

“Besides the excellent professors, who taught at the Center from the surrounding Ivy League schools, and the close proximity of the New York Public Library in whose monumental Reading Room I did much of my studying, the only thing worse than the level of students who enrolled at the Graduate Center were the drug dealers who owned Bryant Park at the time. One could not go across the park to the other side without sidestepping the used condoms in the dirt (there was no grass) and being confronted by drug dealers who made sure you knew they harbored a knife or gun on their person. Needless to say, when last I checked, precisely because of the imbalance of great teachers and mediocre students, and, I’m sure, for other reasons, the English and Comparative Literature Department at the Graduate Center seemed to have been discontinued. Something I predicted would happen when I complained my way through classes. Mostly, to one of my only friends at CUNY, Charles Riley III, a Princeton undergraduate, and to Angus, who I’m sure never understood how I could have been so poor, so dispirited and such an unforgiving elitest.

“In any case, in the end, the whole Holden Cauldfield / Catcher in the Rye thing caught up with me and I simply couldn’t bring myself to complete the doctorate, even though I was one or two exams (Latin, I believe) and a dissertation away from becoming a doctor who had not taken the Hippocratic oath and who couldn’t help or really want to help anyone, much less teach anything. I simply grew to despise academia, and the intellectual and ideological mannequins it seemed to breed, with few exceptions. Independent thinking was hardly encouraged, much less recognized, regardless of the few curt exceptions one had to hunt down.

“Before taking one of these exams, I had met with my official advisor, a world famous translator and ill-advised poet, Allen Mandelbaum, whom I disliked immensely, and who assured me he might be able to secure a teaching position for me in Mississippi, Arkansas, or Kentucky, which upset me no end. I hated New York City, but I hated the rest of the country even more. Knowing myself well enough to know I might have actually considered such a position, from weakness and vulnerability, I decided the only way I could to elude this fate, the only way I could guarantee that I would not succumb, was to fail the exam. Which is to say, I had no courage and knew this was the only way I could end this irrelevant pursuit of an accademic career. So, I got drunk the night before, and in the morning, had a few more, and took the exam inebriated. Which was a strange remedy, since I never drank. All I remember was I gave right answers to wrong questions, or vice versa. When I left the room, I felt like I was flying.

“It was only later I speculated Mandelbaum had set a trap for me. He knew I was the editor and co-publisher of a fairly prestigious small press at the time, although I was only in my late twenties, and he wanted very much to be published by Out of London Press; he also knew I disliked him and his work and that I would never extend such an opportunity, a minor one at that. His revenge was to threaten me with the prospect of winding up in a part of the country he knew was unsuitable for me; in the end, he had no idea how grateful I was that I allowed the failure of that exam to end, even before it began, a life of teaching I would surely have hated, a life I might have chosen out of cowardice and desperation. At least, I think I failed the exam…well, I was sure I did, and never looked back.

“One word about the Catcher in the Rye remark: the school I had tranferred to (from Long Island City High School), McBurney, ceased to exist in 1988 (this seemed to be a theme), but was absurdly memorialized in a mention by J.D. Salinger in said novel. Without this mention, I’m not sure anyone would even remember McBurney ever existed, I mean apart from the YMCA, with which it was unaffiliated. While I admired immensely the novel’s deliquent character, Holden, the closest I came to precocious was being unrelentingly suspicious.”

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In the mid-1970s, Richard Milazzo became the editor and co-publisher of Out of London Press. Among the books he edited were The Syntactic Revolution: The Collected Writings of Abraham Lincoln Gillespie (New York, 1980) and the first English facsimile edition of Pontormo’s Diary, translated by Rosemary Mayer (New York, 1982). Other titles included the first monograph on Vito Acconci by Mario Diacono (a concrete poet who eventually became an art dealer); Discussion by Annina Nosei-Weber, an anthology based on a symposium she organized at New York University before she became an art dealer, which addressed discussion as an art form (Joseph Beuys, Ian Wilson, International Local, etc.); and Robert Pincus-Witten’s Postminimalism, perhaps his most important book, which collected his most seminal texts on ’70s art and artists written originally for Artforum and Arts Magazine. In 1981, Richard co-edited La rosa disabitata 1960-1980 for Feltrinelli, one of the first anthologies to document the post-Gertrude Stein ‘Language’ writing or ‘Language Poetry’ movement in America, or, at least its roots, which included the writings of Vito Acconci, Charles Bernstein, John Cage, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Dick Higgins, Frank Kuenstler, Jackson Mac Low, Bob Perelman, Bern Porter and Jerome Rothenberg, “a so-called avant-garde movement [he] grew to despise.”

In 1982, he began working in New York and internationally as a critic and curator in the art world. His exhibitions and critical writings with Collins & Milazzo brought to prominence a whole new generation of artists in the 1980s. It was their exhibitions and writings that originally fashioned the theoretical context for a new kind of Conceptual Art they theorized as Post-Appropriation. While making the case for this kind of art, they argued against both Neo-Expressionism and Picture Theory art, “the latter, an exceedingly unfashionable thing to do.” It was specifically through this post-critical approach, generating “a synthetical post-dialectical condition for art” (see their book [in two volumes], comprised of the lectures they delivered at Yale, Hyperframes: A Post-Appropriation Discourse in Art), that the work of many of the artists associated with what others described simply as Neo-Conceptualism (and still other critics reductively called “Simulationism” and “Neo Geo”) was first brought together – artists such as Ross Bleckner, James Welling, Peter Nadin, Kevin Larmon, Steven Parrino, Richard Prince, Peter Nagy, Sarah Charlesworth, Mark Innerst, Meyer Vaisman, Oliver Wasow, Gretchen Bender, Allan McCollum, Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons, Philip Taaffe, Robert Gober, Not Vital, David Diao, Saint Clair Cemin, and Annette Lemieux. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Collins & Milazzo would support such artists as Sal Scarpitta, Meg Webster, Lawrence Carroll, Vik Muniz, Fabian Marcaccio, and Alessandro Twombly, as part of this Post-Appropriation discourse. He would later go on to support the work of Elliot Schwartz, Bill Rice, Michel Frère, and write monographs and catalogues and curate one-person shows with Malcolm Morley, Robert Longo, Alex Katz, David Salle, William Anastasi, Joel Fisher, Walter Robinson, Mike Bidlo, among others.

In the early 1980s, he co-published and co-edited Effects: Magazine for New Art Theory in the East Village, and from 1986 to 1988 he was the American co-editor of Kunstforum (Cologne). Among the publications of those years were Radical Consumption and the New Poverty (New York:  New Observations, 1987); Art at the End of the Social (Malmö, Sweden: The Rooseum, 1988); and Hyperframes: A Post-Appropriation Discourse in Art, the lectures they delivered as Senior Critics at Yale University in 1988 and 1989. The lectures were originally published in 1989 and 1990 in two volumes in a bilingual English and French edition in Paris, with Editions Antoine Candau (“former banker and infamous underground pornographer”), which became known as the “Green Books.” They were recently reissued in an Italian edition, compiled by GianCarlo Pagliasso and published by Campanotto Editore in Udine, in 2005. The third volume of these lectures (in the original English) remains unpublished. He co-organized the CHANGE, INC., Benefit for Robert Rauschenberg in New York in 1990, and co-edited An Anthology of Statements Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of White Columns for White Columns in 1991.

He co-curated and curated exhibitions in such galleries and museums as Nature Morte (NY), International with Monument, White Columns, C.A.S.H./Newhouse, Postmasters, Tibor De Nagy, Diane Brown, CEPA (Buffalo, NY), Margo Leavin (Los Angeles, CA), S.L. Simpson (Toronto, Canada), American Fine Arts Co., Massimo Audiello, Lia Rumma (Naples, Italy), Galerie Albrecht (Munich, Germany), John Gibson, 303 Gallery, the Rooseum (Malmö, Sweden), Meyers/Bloom (Santa Monica, CA), Greenberg/Wilson, Tony Shafrazi, Fay Gold (Atlanta, GA), The Hopper House, James Danziger, and Alain Noirhomme (Brussels, Belgium), as well as eight exhibitions in collaboration with the Leo Castelli Gallery, including the New Era Space project in 1991, four in collaboration with the Annina Nosei Gallery, eight in collaboration with the Janis Gallery, including 11, rue Larrey at Sidney Janis Gallery, from 1995 and 1997, a project he founded at Janis, and fourteen exhibitions in collaboration with the Emilio Mazzoli Gallery in Modena, Italy. Interviews with and writings on Collins & Milazzo’s critical and curatorial work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Arts Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Artscribe International, Village Voice, Art & Auction, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Criterion, II Giornale dell’Arte, The New York Times Magazine, HG, New Art Examiner, Galeries Magazine, Flash Art, La Stampa, among others.

He has taught, read, or participated in symposia and lectured at the University of Chicago (“‘Donna me prega’: Modern Poetry and Its Context”), Yale University (on Lacan and mathematics), The Maryland Institute and College of Arts, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Tisch School of the Arts (New York University), The Museum of Modern Art (“Contemporary Art in Context”) in New York, The Glassell School of Art (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas), National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian Institute), Columbia University (New York), Jan van Eyck Akademie (Maastricht, Belgium), The Ghent Academy (Belgium), the High Museum (Atlanta, Georgia), the Flow Chart Foundation, among many others.

He delivered the lecture “Rhetorical Answers: Curating and the Practice of Criticism” at The Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, in conjunction with the Lecture Series “Between Art and Life,” in celebration of Robert Rauschenberg’s receiving The Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has also lectured to Sotheby’s “Connoisseurship in Contemporary Art” seminar, and delivered a paper to the symposium, “The Convergence of Art and Philosophy,” with Jean Baudrillard, Joseph Kosuth and Peter Halley, at ICASA, New York University. He has also delivered a lecture on the work of Jeff Koons, “Against Interpretation; or, the Decline of Abstraction in Contemporary Sculpture,” at the New York Studio School; a series of six lectures on Philip Taaffe at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia; a paper on poetics, “A Poem is Political, How?” at Stony Brook University; and a talk recently at the School of Continuing Education, New York University, entitled “Jeff Koons: Shiny on the Outside, Hollow on the Inside,” which was subsequently published in two parts at hyperallergic (Weekend). He has given poetry readings at Beyond Baroque Foundation, Venice, CA.; Cornelia Street Cafe, Bowery Poetry Club, and the Russian Tea Room, in New York; and several other “surrogate readings” – i.e., readings in which the author asked others to read his work in his stead, including at the Fondazione Gesualdo Bufalino, Comiso, Sicily. This, even while he is in attendance in the audience, finding the reading of poetry to be “a circus-like, embarrasingly excessive, expression of self. Such ordeals, such antics, ought to be limited to the uncoordinated intimacy of the bedroom.”

Most recently, he conducted several poetry projects titled “Drahcir Ozzalim aka Richard Milazzo: A Surrogate Video Reading,” six poems by Richard Milazzo read by Daniel Rothbart at Rothbart’s Public Artwork, Flotilla: A Floating Sculptural Installation in Oakdale Lake, recorded in Oakdale Park, Hudson, New York, October 24, 2020; “A Way of Happening: A Surrogate Video Reading,” four poems by Richard Milazzo, read by Daniel Rothbart at Rothbart’s Water Clocks: A Floating Sculptural Installation in the Hudson River, curated by Aaron Levi Garvey, The Hudson Eye, August 27 - September 6, 2021; and a discussion with Richard Milazzo and Daniel Rothbart, and Reading of “My Portrait by Fantin-Latour” (poem) by Richard Milazzo, moderated by Éric Longo, Interim Executive Director, Flow Chart Foundation, Hudson, New York, June 26, 2025.

In the 1990s, he co-curated the New Era Space in New York, a three-month project sponsored by Leo Castelli, which took place from October to December 1991, and included the one-person shows for the following 15 artists: James Hill, Harland Miller, Donna Moylan, Jeffrey Plate, Adam Rolston; Robert Beck and Jeff Litchfield, Billy Copley, Joo Chung, Nancy M. Hoffman, Nicholas Howey; Robert Burke, Tony Feher, Fabian Marcaccio, Joan Snitzer, Tyler Turkle. He curated an exhibition space he founded, 11, rue Larrey at Sidney Janis Gallery; and co-founded, with Howard B. Johnson and Joy L. Glass, and edits the publishing house, Edgewise Press, which has published books and editions by such cultural figures as Alan Jones, Bruce Benderson, Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, Cid Corman, B.H. Friedman, Abraham David Christian, Remo Guidieri, Rackstraw Downes, Mary de Rachewiltz, John T. Spike, Vik Muniz, Saint Clair Cemin, Enrico Pedrini, Joseph Masheck, Peter Nadin, Ross Bleckner, Joseph Nechvatal, Donald Baechler, Alessandro Twombly, Not Vital, Meg Webster, among others. In 1996, he curated Realism After Seven A.M.:  Realist Painting After Edward Hopper – An Exhibition of 25 Artists in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of the Hopper House, which included such arists as Lennart Anderson, Rackstraw Downes, Richard Estes, Eric Fischl, Paul Georges, Duncan Hannah, Mark Innerst, Alex Katz, Stephen Lack, Malcolm Morley, Philip Pearlstein, Fairfield Porter, Bill Rice, Ed Ruscha, Eric Sparre, Mark Tansey, Robert Terry, and Robin Tewes; and, in 1998, he organized an art auction and benefit exhibition to relaunch Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review on line.

He has curated, both in the United States and Europe, one-person exhibitions of the works of Malcolm Morley, Ross Bleckner, Sandro Chia, Abraham David Christian, Robert Longo, Saint Clair Cemin, Alessandro Twombly, Bill Rice, David Salle, Alex Katz, Mark Innerst, William Anastasi, Peter Nagy, and Walter Robinson. He has written the major monographs, Saint Clair Cemin: Sculptor from Cruz Alta (New York: Brent Sikkema Editions, 2005) and The Paintings of Ross Bleckner (Brussels: Editions Alain Noirhomme, 2007). For Edgewise he has recently co-published, edited, and with introductions, Ross Bleckner’s Examined Life: Writings 1972-2007; Peter Halley: Selected Essays 1981-2001; Donald Baechler’s Victim of Improvement: Telegrams, Stories, Letters, Monologues, Interviews, 1985-2006; and the forthcoming Selected Essays by Walter Robinson. Recently, he edited, for Lucio Pozzi’s new online magazine, OBSzine, an issue entitled Art, Poetry, and the Pathos of Communication, with contributions by Brunella Antomarini, Donald Baechler, Bruce Benderson, Costanza Berardi, Ilya Bernstein, Ross Bleckner, James Brown, Edward Burns, Lawrence Carroll, Peter Carravetta, Saint Clair Cemin, Sandro Chia, Abraham David Christian, Kevin Clarke, Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, Colette, David Deutsch, Chris Dorland, Samantha Dietmar, Carmen Firan, Joel Fisher, Peter Halley, Susan Hefuna, George Hildrew, Jeff Koons, Wayne Koestenbaum, Jonathan Lasker, Annette Lemieux, Robert Longo, Andrew McCarron, Donna Moylan, Vik Muniz, Peter Nadin, Peter Nagy, Aga Ousseinov, GianCarlo Pagliasso, Alison Pearlman, Rolando Perez, Lucio Pozzi, Richard Prince, Barbara Probst, Lucas Reiner, Walter Robinson, Daniel Rothbart, Adrian Sângeorzan, Hans-Christian Schink, Elliot Schwartz, Jeremy Sigler, Olivia Smith, Philip Taaffe, Paul Vangelisti.

Other art books are Malcolm Morley (a monograph); Caravaggio on the Beach: Essays on Art in the 1990s; Jonathan Lasker: Expressions Become Things (a study of the sketches); the study The Flower Paintings of Ross Bleckner (Modena: Galleria Mazzoli Editions, 2011), which functions as the companion volume to The Paintings of Ross Bleckner; and a catalogue on the recent work of Mimmo Paladino (2012). He has written the monographs Peter Nagy: Entertainment Erases History – Works 1982 to 2004 to the Present, and Sandro Chia: Paintings, Sculptures, Drawings, Mosaics. Ursus Books ‘spotlighted’ several of his books at ARLIS (Art Libraries Society), and his Peter Nagy book was selected for the Art and Literature Series by the Senior Librarian, Arezoo Mohseni, at the New York Public Library (May 27, 2015). The pop-up exhibition of Peter Nagy’s Xeroxes, The Art of Reading: Peter Nagy and the Xeroxes, at this event was accompanied by a panel discussion with Peter Nagy, Ross Bleckner, Philip Taaffe, moderated by the author at the library.

Among his most recent books are The Mannequin of History: Art After Fabrications of Critique and Culture, published by Franco Cosimo Panini, Modena, Italy, 2015; Skewed: Ruminations on the Writings and Works of Peter Halley; The Corner of the Room: Ross Bleckner’s Paintings of the 1970s (the third of a 4-volume monograph); A Kiss Before Dying: Walter Robinson – A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures; Nostalgia for Scandal: The ‘Not’ Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Paper by Mike Bidlo, 1984-2022; Outside Our Window: The Recent Paintings of Ross Bleckner, 2018-2025 (the fourth volume of the monograph), the latter five books published by Galleria Mazzoli, Modena, in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2025 respectively. The Mannequin of History was written in conjuntion with EXPO 2015 MODENA, which he curated for the City of Modena, Italy. Also, recently released was Jonathan Lasker’s New Complete Essays, 1984-2019, edited, and with an introduction and commentary, by the author (New York: Edgewise Press, 2020); and is currently working on Walter Robinson’s Selected Essays with a similar critical armature.

A book of his early poetry, Alogon (1969-1981), was published by Tokyo Publishing House in Tokyo in May 2007. Several poems appeared in such magazines as Il Verri, Tam Tam, and others, before he stopped writing poetry in 1982 and resumed writing it in 1993. His first two books of poetry, Le Violon d’Ingres: Sunday Poems and Lineations 1993-1996, and Hotel of the Heart: Poems 1997-2001, were published by Nanni Cagnone’s press, Nightmail (Bomarzo, 2004, and Pavia, 2002, respectively).

Other books of poetry include: Il facchino di Venezia (The Porter of Venice): Poems 2002-2003 (Venice: Sotoportego Editore, 2007); Along the Hudson, with drawings by Abraham David Christian (Tokyo, Japan: Tokyo Publishing House, 2006); Green Nights / Golgotha / Love’s Quarrel: Poems 2001-2003 (Belgrade, Serbia: Dossier, 2007); Stone Dragon Bridge:  Poems of China 2006-2007 (Modena, Italy: Emilio Mazzoli Editore, 2007); An Earring Depending from the Moon: Poems 2006 (Venice: Sotoportego Editore, 2008); Circus in the Fog: Poems 2005-2006 (Venice: Sotoportego Editore, 2009); Eastern Shadows (Craiova: Scrisul Romanesc, 2010); Keats Dying in Your Arms (Brussels: Editions Passage St.-Hubert, 2010); With Grass Ropes We Dragged the World to Her in Wooden Boats: Poems of Jordan, Syria and Egypt 2008 (with accompanying works on paper by Alessandro Twombly) (Turin: Paolo Torti degli Alberti, 2011); Small China Moon (Udine: Campanotto Editore, in 2010); Where Angels Arch Their Backs and Dogs Pass Through (Craiova: Scrisul Romanesc, 2012); Frost Heaves (with accompanying drawings by William Anastasi) (Turin: Libri Canali Bassi, 2013); A Prayer in a Wolf’s Mouth and Like Branches to Wind (with accompanying watercolors by Charles Clough) (Turin: Lower Canal Books, 2014); and Road Narrows: Poems of Tunisia (Craiova: Scrisul Romanesc, 2014); A Tattoo in Morocco: Poems 2007, with accompanying drawings by Mimmo Paladino (Modena: Galleria Mazzoli, 2015); Storyville:Poems 2010, with drawings by George Hildrew (Tokyo, Japan: Tsukuda Island Press, 2017), Ghost Stations: Poems 2015-2016, with a portfolio of photographs by Fausto Ferri (Tokyo, Japan: Tsukuda Island Press, 2017); One Thing at a Time: Poems of Japan 2016, with drawings by Abraham David Christian (Berlin: Galerie Albrecht, 2017); Oracle Bones: Poems 2007, with photographs by Joel Fisher (Tokyo, Japan: Tsukuda Island Press, 2018); Night Song of the Cicadas: Poems of South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, 2017, with drawings by Joel Fisher (Berlin: Galerie Albrecht, August 2018); Scenes of Everyday Life: Poems of Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Russia, 2016, with mixed media works by the Ajerbaijan artist Aga Ousseinov, edited and with an introduction and commentary by the author (Tokyo, Japan: Tsukuda Island Press, 2017), published on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition, Aga Ousseinov: Celestography, at the New York Public Library, 18 West 53rd St. Branch N.Y., February 4 - March 31, 2020; Bamboo Ladders: Poems of Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, 2012, with drawings and collages (Layered Landscapes) by Holger Trülzsch (Berlin, Germany: Geistesblüten, 2022); and Desuetude: Poems of Paris, Venice, Japan, 2017-2018, with photographs by Elliot Schwartz (Tokyo and Hayama, Japan: Tsukuda Island Press, 2022).

His most recent books of poetry are More Fugitive Than Light: Poems of Rome, Venice, Paris, 2016-2017, with collages by Daniel Rothbart (Tokyo and Hayama, Japan: Tsukuda Island Press, 2024); and The Wind is a Clown in Your Closet: Selected Poems Written at the Pensione Accademia, 2018-2024, with works on paper by Sandro Chia (Modena: Galleria Mazzoli, 2025).

Besides Il Verri and Tam Tam, poems have appeared in Evergreen Review (online), Lawrence Carroll’s newspaper, Poetry International Online, Verse Daily, the Mekong Review, and, most recently, “A Story by Graham Greene” was published in the Continental News (Hotel Continental Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam). Reviews of his poetry have appeared in Evergreen Review, World Literature Today (in January-February 2015 and in November-December 2017), and in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Recent curated exhibitions include: The Mannequin of History: Art After Fabrications of Critique and Culture (EXPO 2015 Modena, Italy); Peter Halley: New Paintings – Associations, Proximities, Conversions, Grids, accompanied by the study, Skewed: Ruminations on the Writings and Works of Peter Halley; One Thing at a Time: Drawings and Sculptures by Abraham David Christian, accompanied by an eponymous book of poems by the author; Ross Bleckner: New Paintings, accompanied by the book, The Corner of the Room: Ross Bleckner’s Paintings of the 1970s (Galleria Emilio Mazzoli, 2018); Night Song of the Cicadas: Drawings and Sculptures by Joel Fisher, (Galerie Albrecht, Berlin, 2018); Hanging by a Thread: The Paintings of George Hildrew – A Pop-Up Exhibition at the Steven Harvey Gallery, accompanied by the book, Storyville: Poems 2007, by the author, with drawings by the artist; and Walter Robinson: Paintings and Works on Paper, 2013-2020, accompanied by the monograph, A Kiss Before Dying: Walter Robinson – A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures (Modena, Italy: Galleria Mazzoli, 2020).

His most recent curated exhibitions are Mike Bidlo: The ‘Not’ Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Paper, 1984-2022 (2022); and Ross Bleckner: New Paintings, 2023-2025. He also curated the American sector of the Auction/Benefit for the Modena ARTS Foundation / Academy for Robotic and Transplant Surgery, Modena, Italy; Contributing artists: William Anastasi, Mike Bidlo, Ross Bleckner, Ariel Cabrera Montejo, Peter Halley, Mark Innerst, Annette Lemieux, Robert Longo, Walter Robinson, David Salle.

His most recent catalogue and monograph essays include Franco Fontana: If When You Look in the Mirror and You See Only Yourself, Then Perhaps You Are Not Looking Hard Enough, in Franco Fontana, 1961-2017, Modena, 2021; “From Michelangelo’s Bathhouse (the Sistine Chapel) to Peter Halley’s Washhouse (or Wall Mural Installation, Antesteria) in Orani, Sardinia,” in Peter Halley: Antesteria, Museo Nivola, Orani, Sardinia, 2021; “From the Classical to Pandemonium to the Wayward: Peter Halley’s New Staggered Paintings,” in Peter Halley: Five Staggered Paintings, Galeria Millan, São Paulo, Brazil, 2021; “Piero Pizzi Cannella: The Exquisite Inexactitudes of the Soul,” in Piero Pizzi Cannella: Night Owl, 2014-2022, Modena, May 21, 2022; “The Rootedness of Being: Alessandro Twombly’s Paintings, Sculptures, and Works on Paper,” in Alessandro Twombly: Radici dell’Essere, Fondazione Ghisla Art Collection, Locarno, Switzerland, 2023; “Gian Marco Montesano’s Cathedrals of Italy and the Pertinence of the Soul; or, ‘My Laissez-faire Attitude Is the Mark of a Hidden Sorrow,’” in GianCarlo Montesano, Modena, 2023; “The Silent Circus: The Illicit and Inept Rhapsodies of Pier Paolo Calzolari,” in Pier Paolo Calzolari: Le Terre Est Bleue Comme une Orange, Modena,  2024; Alessandro Twombly: Works on Paper Like Ocean Waves Cresting on an Invisible Shore (London: Tristan Hoare Gallery, 2025); “My Lobby Encounters with James Brown,” in James Brown: Prehistoric New York: 1981-1986, Milan, 2025; and Nicola De Maria: We Have Only To Shut Our Eyes To See the Light, and To Open Them To See the Darkness, Modena, 2025.

Together with The Paintings of Ross Bleckner; The Flower Paintings of Ross Bleckner; The Corner of the Room: Ross Bleckner’s Paintings of the 1970s; and the recently released Outside Our Window: The Recent Paintings of Ross Bleckner, 2018-2025, this completes the author’s 4-volume monograph on this artist.

He delivered the lecture “Enter the Barbarians: Neo-Expressionism, Picture Theory Art, Post-Appropriation, and the Spectacle and Meta-Spectacle of the 1980s – Allan McCollum, Gretchen Bender, Sarah Charlesworth, et alia,” at the conference “Political Values, Market Values, Art Values: The Ethics of American Art in the 1980s,” organized by AnnMarie Perl and Anthony Grudin, Department of Art and Archeology, University Center for Human Values, Council of Humanities and Program in American Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, October 31, 2020. The long version, which was also available at the conference, was published recently by Tsukuda Island Press (Tokyo and New York): Enter the Barbarians: Essays on the History and Culture of the Post-Appropriation Art of the 1980s – Vol. I: Allan McCollum.

Peter Halley’s newly established press, Index Books, recently published a volume of the author’s selected essays, Scam Likely: Post-Critical Essays on Art and Culture, 1988-2025.

Forthcoming are several volumes of poetry: When the Rains Came: Poems of Cambodia, 2015, with works on paper by Lucas Reiner; and a book on poetics, An Allegory of Culture: the Louche and Outré Algorithms of Poetry. Also forthcoming are: The Poignancy of Dialectics; According to What: Essays on Post-Appropriation Art; Theory Sauvage: Essays on Art, Philosophy, and Aesthetics (companions to Art at the End of the Social and The Mannequin of History: Art After Fabrications of Critique and Culture); and an autobiography that might easily double as a book of travel writings, We Are All Beautifully Damaged. He is also preparing three Collins & Milazzo publications, Hegel on Madison Avenue: Essays by Collins & Milazzo, 1982-1993; Seeing Double: Exhibition Statements by Collins & Milazzo, 1984-1993; and Double Talk: Interviews with and by Collins & Milazzo, 1982-1993; a book of the six lectures the author delivered on the work of Philip Taaffe: From Bayonne to the Bay of Naples, from Al Quasbah to Interzonal Leaves: A Draft of Notes Toward A Perception of Philip Taaffe’s Work, at Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, in 2006; and a print project, Sailing to Byzantium: 6 New York Artists in Venice – Donald Baechler, Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, Vik Muniz, Peter Nagy, Walter Robinson, to be exhibited at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzetto Tito, Venice, accompanied by a book published by Fabjbasaglia Contemporary Art, in Rimini, documenting the exhibition and the prints.

Also forthcoming are the monographs, Alessandro Twombly: The Unquiet Sun – Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Paper, 1985-2025, from the Tristan Hoare Gallery, London; Annette Lemieux: In the Glare of Shadows – Paintings, Sculptures, Photographs, and Mixed-Media Works; and Peter Halley and the Prison of History: Paintings, Installations, and Other Works, 1974-2025.

He lives and works in New York City.

New York City, June 2025