The Book of Jade

A single slim volume of poems is all David Park Barnitz left behind, published in 1901, the year he died at twenty-three. Steeped in the Decadent mood of Baudelaire and the late nineteenth century, the poems dwell on death, boredom, decay, and a weary disgust with existence, shot through with imagery drawn from Buddhism, Egyptian gods, and the far East. The tone is deliberately morbid and grand, half sincere despair and half stylish pose. Long out of print and passed hand to hand by collectors of the strange, The Book of Jade has become a minor cult item among readers of Gothic and Decadent verse. Free to read here in PDF and EPUB.