Geoffrey O'Brien (born 1948) is an American poet, editor, book and film critic, translator, and cultural historian.
[2] He has also been published in numerous other publications, including Filmmaker, American Heritage, The Armchair Detective, Bomb, Boston Globe, Fence, GQ, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Men's Vogue, Mother Jones, The Nation, Newsday, and Slate, and has contributed many essays for liner notes for The Criterion Collection.
Highly associative in approach, his dense, highbrow prose is often brought to bear upon the worlds of low-budget exploitation films and pulp fiction as well as more upscale and respectable venues of the cinematic, theater, literary, or popular music worlds.
These wide-ranging pieces have been described as idiosyncratic "prose poems" [3][4] and tend towards partial autobiography in which he recollects youthful experiences as a reader or viewer which — although they may or may not have been shared by his readership — can lead deeply into unexpected aspects of the material at hand.
"[5] Writing in Bookforum, Robert P. Baird described Early Autumn as a "book of elegant, often moving poems" "writ[ten] so comfortably in the elegiac mode that [O'Brien] sometimes makes us forget poetry was equipped to handle any other.