A landmark collection of poems by Bambi Lake, the beloved (and bad-mouthed) icon of San Francisco’s counterculture.

Bambi Lake was a trans chanteuse performer, provocateur, and countercultural darling of the ‘70s, and subsequent decades. “The Glamorous Life follows me around,” she wrote, and sang about in her ballad “The Golden Age of Hustlers” (later popularized by Justin Vivian Bond). Her life in San Francisco—including stints in the Cockettes and the Angels of Light—was “sort of legendary,” sort of “sweet, sticky, nasty,” and always precarious, lived in spite of addiction, homelessness, and the horrors that came from chasing, and surviving, her own dreams.

Here are her poems, long out of print, that wear “burgundy velvet jezebel bras” to seduce “fatally hetero” men, chronicling the macabre cabaret of desire amidst social, cultural, and political change. “I am Beauty,” she writes, “and the world dissolves.”

The collection includes a series of interviews by August Bernadicou, and a foreword by Brontez Purnell.