" To edit too much, to seek out too many opinions, to relegate ourselves to self-censorship, either in content or style, political correctness or taste, is to rob ourselves of experimentation, of therapy, and is to potentially exclude from our writing, our work, precisely what we wish to find, precisely what we are seeking."
- from the essay Masterpieces and Scraps
from Candle In The Rib Cage: Essays on Art, Life, etc.
Judson Vereen is the author of:
62 poems from Judson Vereen, his first collection of published poetry;
American Pleasure, his debut novel;
Like A Bird Knows To Sing: Poems from Minas Gerais, his second collection of poetry;
Judson Vereen: Selected Collage 2005-2025, a twenty-year survey of collage work;
Forthcoming: Candle In The Rib Cage: Essays on Art, Life, etc;
Notes on a Full Life
Additionally, Vereen is the author of Dispatches From Bohemian Splendor, a newsletter featuring personal essays,
poetry, travel sketches and other various writings.
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Judson writes regularly on Substack, in his publication Dispatches from Bohemian Splendor. Click here to access it.
American Pleasure
American Pleasure- click here to buy it
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DEBUT NOVEL. American Pleasure is a psycho-sexual first-person narrative by American artist Judson Vereen. Set in San Francisco, the work explores exactly one year of the writer's various personal struggles within a rapidly changing city. Judson is a high school drop out resigned to inner city bohemia. He gives a tell-all account of his various bouts with addiction, financial insecurity, and uncontrollable sexual impulses, all while pursuing his training as an EMT, his “only salvation”. His struggles are exacerbated when he becomes romantically entangled with the magnetic Lindsay Larson, a local budding Adult film star. The author falls in love with Lindsay, just as she gains notoriety in the world of hardcore pornography and extreme disgrace sex, throwing him into a whirlwind of turmoil, desperation, and obsession. The author reveals thoughts on various themes ranging from urban vice, sexual humiliation, and recovery. The book is a reflection of the turbulent times in which it was written. Graphic content. Strong sexual themes. This is a debut novel.
American Pleasure – book review
Zephareth Ledbetter
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When I sat down to read Judson Vereen's American Pleasure I had a pad and pen handy, prepared to dissect and analyze the sections of the story for review. But I found myself unable to do so, as its linear narrative defies the separation of sections; a continuous series of thoughts, nearly unbroken.
The narrator, broken down, leads a simple existence—this is not a story of heroic exploits, but of finding one's meaning in a sea of obsessiveness. His is a world of similes and metaphors; he peels the layers off things like they are onions. He has settled into his life of mundane vices—writing without pay or acknowledgement, hanging out with friends, drinking to excess, masturbating, wash, rinse, repeat, until he sees the woman of his obsession. Though he likely doesn't yet recognize it, that obsession is exposed from the onset. He imagines who she is, where she goes, what she does, and eventually gets to really know her. He falls obsessively in love despite her burgeoning career as a willing sex worker, and he jockeys between satisfying his own perversions by voyeuristically experiencing every detail of her work, replaying it over and over in his mind.
To some degree, he descends into madness. Even after he lets her go, the "visions" of her cling stubbornly to his waking life, skewing his perspectives of just about everything else. She is agonizing, yet to lose that agony would be to lose her. Teetering on schizophrenia, he tries to drown out the memories of her with drink, drugs, and avoidance of familiar things while simultaneously embracing those memories and their associated pain. He can't have her, but he can't have enough of her. All other aspects of his existence fall by the wayside, ashes to ashes, and he must decide whether to tear off his skin and start anew or wallow obsessively into oblivion.
Vereen's prose borders on poetry. Where many search for the perfect descriptive word, he seems incapable of finding ones which are lacking. His extensive descriptions of seemingly inert observations border on psychedelia, especially during the narrator's descent. But they remain captivating, leading the reader along to experience his thoughts, as he sees them, along with him.
For anyone looking to climb out of the traditional storytelling box, this book is highly recommended.
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Judson Vereen: Selected Collage 2005-2025
Judson Vereen: Selected Collage 2005-2025- click here to buy it
A monograph featuring twenty years of mixed media, assemblage and collage. The book roughly focuses on works made between the years 2005-2025; it contains 300 pages and features over 200 works, as well as studio photographs, studio portraits, and extensive interviews. The interviews provide context for the cities where Judson has lived and worked in, the work’s influences and evolution, and some insight into his craft and lifestyle. The book also contains many full bleed photographs, as well as close up details of many works.
Like A Bird Knows To Sing
Like A Bird Knows To Sing- click here to buy it
Like A Bird Knows To Sing is Judson Vereen's second collection of poetry. Most of the poems were written in the state of Minas Gerais, Brasil. Dedicated to his wife, the author describes the work as a form of meditation- being far away from his native country after having found a new life and a new calm in the countryside of Brasil.
62 poems from Judson Vereen
62 Poems from Judson Vereen- click here to buy it​
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"62" is a collection of poems and writings by Judson Vereen that covers a time span of approximately six years. Included in this short compendium are works conceived in the cities of New York, Atlanta, and briefly San Francisco. This collection sums up the writer's main concerns involving love and eroticism, the state of a young modern individual, and selections from "Bed-Stuy Solitude", celebrating the Brooklyn neighborhood.
62 Poems from Judson Vereen – book review
Yasmin Vereen
People often romanticize young poets, and the appeal is quite clear: there is something special about being so new, so bursting with feeling - almost pure in the way they conduct themselves and express their inner worlds. What there may in Judson Vereen's "62 poems" goes beyond anything that can be put in such expected words; there is a level of depth, a degree of skepticism in Vereen’s collection that escapes any of these clichés.
There is pain in many of his words. But there is also light. Lightness and darkness dance beautifully all over this compendium made by the artist in his teenage years. Many of the poems are short and fleeting - everything about “62” seems to have a sense of urgency, but hardly the one we usually associate with youth; it is an urge to live fully, to devour and elaborate complex feelings about being a creative person that loves intensely, makes art incessantly and struggles to understand his role in the world we live in - a world whose rules clearly never made any sense to the author. His declarations to former lovers are passionate, and so is the way his words are directed to friends, cities, and anything that captures the attention and the heart of the artist.
Following Vereen's career as a whole, it is noticeable that the inclination to cause extreme and strong reactions seems to come pretty easy to his artistic self. But there is no point here in separating the artist and the man, or, in the case of “62”, the boy: such a personal work deserves to be appreciated under a personal, intimate light. And here lies the strength of "62": personal excavation. The self-exploration and expression of raw feelings and thoughts made by the artist as a young man come with such honesty about who he is and where he wishes to be. The poetry you will find here vibrates with beautiful and sometimes uncomfortable truths - and while this compendium is brief, it serves as a rewarding introduction to the work of a restless artist.
62 poemas de Judson Vereen - Versão em português
"62" cobre um perÃodo de aproximadamente seis anos de poemas e outros escritos de Judson Vereen. Os trabalhos foram concebidos nas cidades de Nova Iorque, Atlanta e brevemente São Francisco. A coleção sintetiza alguns dos principais temas de interesse de Vereen, incluindo amor e erotismo, o estado em que se encontra o jovem moderno, e também uma seleção intitulada "Solidão de Bed-Stuy", uma série que celebra o famoso bairro do Brooklyn, Nova Iorque.