Revamped from its original "double album" version of 350 pages into this unique "remix," To Repel Ghosts captures the dynamic work and brief life of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. In spare, jazzlike verse Kevin Young tells the story of Basquiat's rise from the mock prophet and graffiti artist SAMO to one of the hottest painters of the 1980s ("blue-chip Basquiat / playing the bull / market"), exploring the artist's bouts with fame and heroin, mourning his untimely death, and celebrating his legacy. Along the way Young riffs on Basquiat's paintings and sayings, on the music he loved, on the artists he ran with (Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, among them), and on the black heroes (Charlie Parker, Muhammad Ali, Billie Holiday) who inspired him. Young's poetic channeling of Basquiat--a jostling, poignant brand of downtownspeak--makes for an urban epic in the tradition of Langston Hughes's "A Dream Deferred." To Repel Ghosts, along with Young's Jelly Roll: A Blues and Black Maria, his recent book of film noir verse, forms an American trilogy--Devil's Music--that explores other art forms through poetry. In its creation, Yound has become a poet whose work speaks both for and beyond his genre, with a music all its own.

'80s art-world phenomenon Jean-Michel Basquiat was prolific in his short lifetime, creating an exhilarating new art inspired by music, language, and black American cultural icons. To Repel Ghosts synchronizes the harmony and discord of Basquiat's canvases, adapting them as a bass line to improvise and play upon. Author of the award-winning Most Way Home, Kevin Young here renders ambitious, celebratory poetry of the everyday and the exalted -- a double-album in verse, a jazz symphony, a hip-hop opera -- taking Basquiat's funkified history and making it sing.

As a poet, Young is as dazzlingly agile and as hard-hitting as Jack Johnson in his prime.-Lorenzo Thomas. Kevin Young has written a big and audacious book. To Repel Ghosts is more than a double album of riffs, songs, laments, outbursts, raps, and tunes. It is more than a book of poems about the tragic life of Jean-Michel Basquiat. It is more than a history of black genius. To Repel Ghosts is a postmodern masterpiece that challenges those who believe we have reached the end of history.-John Yau.

A powerful, rage-filled entity throws a man across a room. An incubus heralds his attacks with the smell of burnt cookies. A demon disguises itself as a guardian angel and humiliates a woman to the point of madness. Vanquishing Ghosts and Demons explores more than thirty terrifying case studies of a spiritualist medium and her colleagues. The bizarre and horrifying true accounts in this book will have readers on the edge of their seats, aghast at what is "out there." Investigating reports of creatures from the astral plane who have entered our world through portals or by invitation, Sandrea Mosses has encountered treacherous spirits, other-dimensional beings, and full-blown demonic infestations. Having removed other-dimensional predators from people, places, and the land itself, Mosses is living proof that with the proper training and tools, dark entities can be beaten.