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. 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.

Jennifer clement basquiat