Bonnie Frazer was born on 23 July 1939 in Washington, D.C., the daughter of a State Department official. She attended Sweet Briar College and became a part of the Beat literary movement when she married the often-jailed jazz poet Ray Bremser in 1959. Any account of her life and her book Troia: Mexican Memoirs (1969) is necessarily linked with the figure of Ray Bremser, whose significance in her career is indicated by the new title given Troia when London Magazine Editions published it in England in 1971: For Love Of Ray.

In his introduction to Ray Bremser's first book, Poems of Madness (1965), Allen Ginsberg tells us that the poet was born in 1934 in Jersey City and spent six years in Bordentown Reformatory on an armed-robbery charge. Released in 1958, he saw his poems published in LeRoi Jones's Yugen magazine and gave readings with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Jones, and Frank O'Hara at Princeton, Vassar, and...