Poet, journalist, and crime novelist, Kenneth Fearing (1902-61) wrote poems filled with the lingo of advertising and radio broadcasts and tabloid headlines, sidewalk political oratory, and the pop tunes on the jukebox. He evoked the jitters of the Depression and the war years in a voice alternately sardonic and melancholy, and depicted a fragmenting urban world bom-barded by restless desires and unnerving fears. But this portraitist of his era also foreshadowed much that was to come in American writing. This volume reveals him as a vernacular prophet of media culture and consumerism, and at the same time as a lyric poet of tremendous gifts.