Padam Padam

The Collected Poems

Kevin Killian author Jason Morris editor Evan Kennedy editor Kay Gabriel editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Nightboat Books

Publishing:18th Dec '25

£17.99

This title is due to be published on 18th December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Padam Padam cover

Advance Reader Copies 

Digital ARCs sent to media for national print, radio, and online campaign

Social media campaign, with the book promoted by key literary influencers focusing on Queer and Gay literature.

Promotion on Nightboat’s e-newsletter and interview on Nightboat Blog

Submission to major literary and book awards

Simultaneous print and e-book release

Launch event in NYC and the San Francisco 

Email [email protected] for more information


A posthumous celebration of the poet and provocateur Kevin Killian, Padam Padam pulses with camp, pop culture, and pleasure.

Kevin Killian—the puckish poet, playwright, novelist, scholar, and impresario of the Bay Area arts community—channeled the charisma of the pop stars. Pulled from his legendary corpus, and long out of print, the work collected here is the record of Killian’s life as a radical littérateur. In Argento Series, Killian conjures the horror, suspense, and cinematic imagery of director Dario Argento as he documents the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. In Action Kylie, he revels in queer identity and the universal love of fandom. In Tweaky Village and Tony Greene Era, Killian elevates artists and friends to legendary status within his personal pantheon. And Elements, Killian’s wink at the periodic table, makes its U.S. debut.

The collection features an introduction by Kay Gabriel, who writes of Killian’s “fabulous, permissive body of work, charming, filthy and smarmy at turns, with its retchable milk enemas and its devilish twists.”

“Kevin loved culture and was its constant undoing.”
Eileen Myles

“I used to say Kevin was the only person I ever knew who possibly could have come from a different planet—an enigma who possessed superhuman knowledge, baffling productivity, and later, super-human kindness.”
Robert Glück

“Oh, he is a dark master of the word, Kevin Killian, an inviting bridegroom and a voyeur who’ll let us play in his fictions until we’re spent.”
D.A. Powell 

“Like his beloved Kylie Minogue sings, Kevin created a body of work that is "more than [we] dare to think about"—a "dark secret" that filled and felt "the need," a deep need, in all of us.”
Dorothea Lasky 

ISBN: 9781643622903

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

384 pages