The Fly in the Ointment

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a five-person collective known as Fly gave now-legendary poetry readings in and around Baltimore, Maryland. Their poems-formally diverse, topically challenging, both witty and intense, variously hilarious and fulminating-emerged from the conflicting energies of those literary and political times and the group's affinities and enmities. At risk of being lost to history, the poems are here presented in their final states as collected by the group's organizer, Barrymore Ashe, before his untimely death. This provocative volume joins the lineage of Lyrical Ballads, Des Imagistes, and The Lion's Tail and Eyes in presenting the seminal work of a close-knit group of poets who galvanized, encouraged, and competed with each other.