Hedonists Heaven: 3 Poetry Collections in 1
“To be your lover, I had to have a heart of steel, soft only for your hands and holding. So I started picking myself apart, handing it freely to strangers, offering my help like the body of christ- Trying to become whole from all that helping.”
A culmination of the erotic, obscene and uninhibited ravings of a misfit creative, Harley Claes captures the world of the underground as seen in punk houses, homeless ventures, erotic experiences and sex work. With 68 uncensored poems, the text has a backdrop of images from cult classics like Harmony Korine, Larry Clark, and other iconic directors, as well as photography by Sicily Townley and classic pulp cover women.
In Pacifist in a Punk House, Claes captures the day to day lifestyle of living on the edge in a house full of punks while ensnared in a toxic relationship. In The Holy Erotic Armageddon poems play love games with language encouraged by an outpour of animalistic vice. Exempt from the vulgarity of it’s era, ARMAGEDDON poeticizes the obscene and makes beauty of debauchery. In CIRCA de CABARET, sex work is eternalized through script, capturing the perspective of a vengeful dancer who is addicted to cash flow.
❝Imagine if Persephone was not betrothed to Hades, but seduced him on purpose. Imagine if Aileen Wuornos picked up a pen instead of a gun. Then you can imagine the vision of The Holy Erotic.❞
Tully Lapish
On The Holy Erotic Armageddon
Read A Review of The Book Here
See Excerpts From The Book Here
.jpg)
.jpg)
Junk Poems
“Chasing fruits with cigarettes in the fall winter of my life, sitting outside killing my suns with light, I terrorized god with abolition and I sold my soul to seek higher than him.”
A collection of junk journal collages spanning different vintage and kitsch aesthetics. Handwritten poems of varying themes are scattered among the visuals.
See Excerpts From The Book Here
.jpg)
Curio House Collages
“A visual collection of surreal collages that exist in a landscape of many different aesthetics.”
A collection of 100+ of my digital collages. None of the images belong to me, although I did collage them myself.
House of Wonders
“Like drawn curtains of the mind - tortured ecstasies perspired from newborn flesh, writing odes of obscenities on their slanted skins. Their past lives followed them, each bud just ebbing to bloom. What they struggled with before their latest incarnation would come disguised now as a new life lesson.”
The House of Wonders is an avant-garde experimental short story, both spiritual and visual. The formatting is a visual expression of the ever-changing mind. It follows the story of a boys journey towards understanding the truth of his existence.
Venus Captives: A Sapphic in Hiding
“Our story is based in beauty, marbled by a lost city spoken of only in ancient rites. Our protagonists were sinking ships in the world of the underground, damned by their knowledge of the unknown.”
A tale about two grandiose twin sisters that live a decadent lifestyle in a big abandoned theatre. A Sapphic in Hiding follows a lesbian love affair in the midst of a goddess cult.
Digi-Diary Zine
“I am a world bottled in a flesh that is forbidden. A heart untouched, a land not yet conquered. No man can decipher the inscriptions of my being. Every woman is a weapon and every man a willing victim. And my luck is absent. I am divorced from everything, a shell so intimately admired and treasured.”
The Digi-diary zine is a collection of collaged digital diary entries written by Harley Claes. It is an A5 size stapled zine consisting of 12 pages of collaged diary entries that were created on goodnotes.
Bebop Collages Zine
“The backstage of eternity is a honey-moon suite. God's tapestry, a moon-dipped room of nothingness- vacant motel of earthen afterglow”
The Bebop Collages zine is a collection of cut-up poems collaged by Harley Claes.
Pity The Poetics
"We are more than kids raised on red solo cups and dependant on susbtance. We are embryionic visionaries, selling sonnets of truth, dimebag after dimebag."
Pity The Poetics is the first poetry collection that I wrote, and I published it in 2017 when I was just 17 years old. It contains 105 prose poems and 7 flash fiction pieces. Here is a review of it on goodreads by John Allen.
"In a series of half parable, half imaginatively descriptive direct disclosures, Harley Claes paints the portrait of what it might be like to have art replace the world and put the paint just where the real wounds are. "Boy Spoken For" and "Junkyard Messiah" are metaphorical decodings of society's post 9/11 post every war and shock not only to the U.S. but mainstream society anywhere have suffered and the fragmented consciousness left. This has a peerless lucidity which still gazes from the prosodic heritage of a writer like Leonora Carrington or Benjamin Peret. Exposes some things with the immediacy of a freshly opened cut.
.jpg)
.JPG)
.JPG)
