Loser Makes Good - Softcover

In 1994, the year that the world lost luminaries Charles Bukowski, Bill Hicks, and Kurt Cobain, 22-year-old Greg Gerding sought to find his own voice, his language, as a writer and an intellectual. Gerding set off on a journey of self-exploration, inebriation, social deviation, and intimate relations, and chronicled his experiences with poetry and prose. Loser Makes Good contains selected works taken from eight handwritten notebooks Gerding filled over that year. A true self-portrait of the artist as a young man, Loser follows Gerding as he questions convention, confronts obligation, and rebels against expectation in an effort to fully realize himself as an artist, and a man. Loser Makes Good falls in line with the works of great symbolists, modernists, and decadents like Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. Gerding also cites the writings of Bukowski, Jim Morrison, and Henry Rollins as influential.

Greg Gerding cut his teeth on the poetry scene in Washington, D.C. shortly after he began writing in 1994. He's had seven books published since and launched University of Hell Press in 2005. Gerding was born in Kentucky, has lived and/or worked in nearly every city in America, and currently resides in Portland, Oregon.