The fourth in the series of Sea Urchin chapbooks is the first publication of William Levy’s poem Alien Bread.
William Levy (Baltimore, 1939) attended the University of Maryland and Temple University and taught in the literature department at Shippensburg State College, Pennsylvania, during which period he co-founded the ‘Insect Trust Gazette’, a poetry magazine which – among others – published William Burroughs. Levy developed into a spearhead of the European underground soon after he had left the US in 1966. As chief-editor of the underground magazine ‘International Times’ and the first European sex paper ‘Suck’, Levy found himself refused entry to England as a “thoroughly undesirable character” and a “dealer in pornography” in 1970. After having been detained in England for a week, Levy was given the choice of either going to Holland or being sent to an English prison. Levy chose the former and settled in Amsterdam, where he has lived since. ‘Alien Bread’ is a sublime existentialist poem which, once printed, spreads out in a gently undulating shape on the page. The poem is met – both in contents and shape – by an illustration by Ben Schot that can be viewed from different angles. Alien Bread is manna from dark heavens.