Sometimes he would bounce and box around the apartment hitting the refrigerator and the walls. He said he could feel thunderbolts in them. He said he liked to put his hands in them and just lie on the bed and watch television. He says he loves Suzanne also because she is the first woman he has ever met who is a living, walking, breathing cartoon. He loves anyone who died from a drug overdose. His heroes are Hendrix, Joplin, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday and Joe Louis. In the vignette titled “Genealogy of Heroes,” she writes: Mallouk’s voice (in italics) is a literary device, a “riff,” Clement says. Through sublime voice work Widow Basquiat oscillates between Clement’s third-person present tense narration and Mallouk’s first-person voice recounting her life lived with and without Basquiat. After Basquiat died in 1988, Clement, in collaboration with Mallouk, expanded the poems into a story-like form. From 1982 through 1984, Clement wrote a series of poems about Mallouk, which became the skeleton of Widow Basquiat. In the early ‘80s, Clement, attempting to embark on her writing career, and a then-unknown Basquiat, both viewed Mallouk as a muse. “Widow Basquiat” is the gloomy nickname given by the art critic and artist Rene Ricard to Suzanne Mallouk well before her lover, Jean-Michel Basquiat, died. It is a poetic conversation, literary document and oral history, an inspiring portrait of a city that is in the process of forever altering what’s considered American art, American literature and American music. Clement’s memoir is being published in America this month but arrives directly from the times it covers.

Parks weaves tales of “Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini of the Muslim and African American icons Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and Muhammad Ali of the young militants of the civil rights and black power movements and of the tragic experiences of the less famous, like the Brazilian youngster Flavio, combine to form an unforgettable story.Jennifer Clement’s Widow Basquiat : A Love Story is infused with the artistic electricity of a whole scene at a seminal time in the American arts: early ‘80’s New York City. Parks’ work as a photographer, Hollywood screenwriter, director and novelist brought him into direct contact with acclaimed figures of his age, becoming a confidant of civil rights leaders and a journalist of artists and world celebrities. Refusing to surrender to despair, he instead transformed his experience of poverty and racism into a creative force.

Gordon Parks’ autobiography Voices in the Mirror traces the American photographer’s difficult early life in Minnesota working at menial jobs and riding streetcars all night to escape the cold, through the ghettos of Rio and Harlem and the glamour of Paris to becoming the first black photographer at Vogue and Life.

Widow basquiat by jennifer clement