A moving, vividly rendered novel from the author of "The Basketball Diaries"

Suffused with Jim Carroll's humor and sharp wit, his delicate yet hallucinatory imagery, and his cool, sophisticated, streetsmart voice, "The Petting Zoo" is a frank, haunting examination of one artist's personal and spiritual quest. Billy Wolfram, an enigmatic thirty-eight- year-old star of the late -1980s New York art scene, views a show of Velazquez paintings and is so humbled by their spiritual power that he suffers an emotional breakdown and retreats to his Chelsea loft. In seclusion, he recalls the most emblematic moments and figures of his childhood and early career as he searches to recover the spark of inspiration in his own work and life.

In 1973, at the age of twenty-three, Jim Carroll burst upon the poetry scene with his first collection, Living at the Movies, a book of vivid and inventive verse that won him comparisons to everyone from Arthur Rimbaud to Frank O'Hara.

Carroll's first new book of poetry in more than a decade, Void of Course presents work composed over the last two years. His major themes--love, friendship, desire, time and memory, and, above all, the ever-present city--emerge in an atmosphere where dream and reality mingle on equal terms. These seventy-seven poems range from graphic, sensuous shorter pieces to edgy stream-of-consciousness prose poems to longer, more contemplative works such as "While She's Gone," an eerie tour de force of longing over a departed lover. Void of Course establishes that Carroll's power and purity of vision are stronger than ever.

The illuminating, shocking, humorous diary that tells all about the sex, the frugs and the atmosphere of New York in the late '60s and early '70s. A supremely entertaining book that will expand the legion of Carroll's fans.