An outrageous spectacle of love between two untamed poets, a 27-year old man and a teenage boy, written by one of America’s original punks and finest writers.

Based on Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s notorious affair, but set in the epochal downtown poetry scene of filthy 1970s New York, Godlike is a tribute to poetry and the beauty and mess of art, desire, and New York City.

New York poet Paul Vaughn has a trick for enjoying poetry readings: He simply imagines the reader died a long time ago. Paul is twenty-seven, married, and an admired poet himself. R. T. Wode’s mission is to give offense. He’s also a poet, freshly landed in the city, and, at age sixteen, unknown.

Paul worships T. They embark on a tempestuous affair, dropping acid and crashing parties and perambulating the grit and grime of New York City circa 1972. Paul is in love with T., but T. is in love with experience. Their relationship disintegrates.

A novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty by legendary musician and poet Richard Hell, Godlike transposes the notorious romance of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud to the East Village in its squalid, glorious ’70s heyday. The book comprises a version of Paul’s 1997 hospital notebooks: diaries amidst poems and essays, along with, most pertinently, the poet’s third-person memoir-novelette of his youthful time with the now-famous T. Godlike is infused as well with evocations—and sometimes actual poems—of many New York poets of the era, from Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett to Edwin Denby and James Schuyler. It achieves a lyricism both profane and profound as it conjures the frenetic vitality as well as the existential malaise of an era. It’s a searching meditation on art, life, love, and the impossibility of everything.

“Raw, refined, superficially slapdash and impeccably constructed, Godlike deserves its title by becoming a resonant, multilayered work of literature that goes down easily as pulp. What stuns is that it’s much more—a poetry-filled novel about poets so introspective, magnetic and alive that even those who think they hate the stuff will find this book irresistible.” —Rod Smith, Time Out New York

“Poet and punk pioneer Hell’s lyrically melancholy second novel (after Go Now), set primarily in the East Village circa 1972, honors decadence and dissolution and celebrates art and angst in a compelling if unsettling story of 27-year-old married poet Paul Vaughn’s (‘I’m not really a faggot. I just have a queer streak’) transcendent affair with a 16-year-old. […] Hell’s prose, alternately explosive and tender but always charged with rewarding humanity, ably propels the story. By no means a mainstream effort, this gritty novel will find readers in the demimonde of poets and people who read them, and among those who appreciate how artistry and sexuality can fuel each other.” —Publishers Weekly

“Everyone from Liv Tyler to Egon Schiele earns memorable analysis. [Hell] waxes eloquent on cartoons and comic books as paradisal eternity. Birds and God show up hand in hand with Bresson, Dante, and J.Lo. […] Through it all, Godlike functions as a downtown guidebook circa 1971 […] More importantly, the text’s a literary treatise stitched with shards of [Ron] Padgett, an attempt to locate a gallant geometry verifying love’s reality, and proof again that Hell would have carved a smashing oeuvre even if he’d opted to remain plain old Richard Meyers.” —Brandon Stosuy, Village Voice

“This prose, like poetry, moves at the speed of thought and just as awkwardly. Its jangly, nervous, unpredictable music, slipping abruptly between the first person of memoir and a storyteller’s more distanced third person, is thrillingly thin-skinned. Anyone who ever doubted that Hell could achieve with words alone something as compelling as what he’s done with words and music together will have to think again.” —Barry Schwabsky, Galatea Resurrects

“Careening between a past already hazy with the sensory derangements of seventies downtown New York flaneur-dom and an equally precarious present, [Hell’s] narration shuffles between impossible knowledge of T.’s and others’ inner landscapes, and a visceral verisimilitude. […] The morning after T., fresh from Kentucky, first approaches Paul at a poetry reading and they have sex in the apartment Paul shares with his pregnant wife, ‘the sun found them out on the floor of the little parlor entangled and gritty, the faint death-smell of the half digested food and alcohol mixing with the brute light; bodies God’s idle graffito.’ No cleanliness as godliness around here: smears, smudges, suspect stickiness are ciphers for god, light, transcendence. T., the vomit-spattered, strung-out teen, becomes Him.” —Leora Lev, American Book Review

“From the beginning, Richard Hell has burned with the same blue flame of misfit insight and desperate beauty.” —Jerry Stahl, Bookforum

‘[Hell] almost single handedly [created] ‘punk’ as we know it…. Few people have been as important—yet as underappreciated as Richard Hell. Poet, musician, fashion icon and terrific, terrific writer. Chances are, you have been deeply influenced by Richard Hell your whole life. You just didn’t know it.’ —Anthony Bourdain

“[Hell’s] every move and word reveal a naked, impassioned intelligence in the throes of the only truly rock & roll artistic convulsion.” —Lester Bangs

“Richard Hell is my hero.” —Dennis Cooper

Godlike

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By Richard HellAfterword by Raymond Foye