Just Kids (Paperback)

Punk rock poet Patti Smith pays tribute to a former lover and forever friend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, in this paean to their days as impoverished artists in 1970s New York. Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe recognized each other as kindred spirits during the seminal summer of 1967, and in the ensuing decade they would nurture each others artistic instincts through constant poverty and sporadic drug use, until both began to achieve recognition in the mid- to late 1970s. Smith particularly focuses on the couples years living in the Chelsea Hotel, where they subsisted on Smiths earnings from various bookstores while interacting with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Janis Joplin. With the same brand of ragged rhapsody which infuses her lyrics and poetry, Smith crafts a memorable elegy to her soul mate while capturing the zeitgeist of glamorous abjection which has come to define 1970s New York. JUST KIDS was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award.