A slim but gorgeous, highly experimental work, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid follows, somewhat disjointedly, the life of the famous outlaw and a bit of his legend, too. Through a mixture of Ondaatje's unparalleled poetry (he is undoubtedly the most under-appreciated poet in the English-speaking world) and his equally moving, memorable prose, the reader drifts in and out of Billy's mind, his experiences, and the perspectives of the people who knew and loved him. The book is deeply focused on visual imagery, on the idea of photographs, of freezing a moment in time with foreground sharp and background blurred, on the act itself of making an image in order to preserve a memory.

Poignantly, the book opens with a caption beneath a blank "photograph" and ends with the type-written text of a very old graphic novel, sans images, featuring Billy the Kid: his own legend obscuring his life, continuing forward after his death; Billy becoming unseen behind the image of Billy.

It is a deeply moving, visceral work, as all Ondaatje's works are. This, his riskiest and strangest book, may also be his best -- and it is certainly his least appreciated.

This is pure, emotional literary fiction at its best. Highly recommended.

I really wasn't sure how to rate this one. I did read it for a class, so I might come back and change my rating after I've reread it and discussed it more fully, but for now, I'm giving it three stars. This was an interesting book, experimental in that it combines prose, poetry, and interview segments, all of which I believe to be invented by the author (though based on real events). My interest in the book varied greatly depending on the individual segment I was on, with the prose generally tending to work better for me than the poems, though I could not always place exactly where in time we were or who everyone was due to the nature of the book. The parts that caught my interest the most were a few segments early on that took on a bit of a body horror element (I now want to read a horror western) and the parts toward the end detailing the end of Billy's career/life (probably because this part felt more like a coherent narrative I could follow).

Interesting tale telling. I enjoyed the lack of pictures to fit the descriptions. It made me want to read more so I could fill those gaps. Switching between poems and stories form different characters was quite original. Another key point..... very dirty and gory.

I picked this up on a trip to the Southwest in the '80s not really knowing what it was. I'd never read Ondaatje before. After I finished, I still didn't know what it was, except that it was fabulous, surprising, exciting. Turned me on to Ondaatje. This book needs more attention.

This has languished on my shelf for years. It had been recommended again and again, but it was poetry (despite being called a novel), and well, I had problems with that. That's changed now, thanks to a poetry workshop with Mark Frutkin (Fabrizio's return etc.) that opened my eyes to the beauty of a form I'd always somewhat feared. I thought I needed some masters-in-English key to understand, truly understand, poems. I was wrong. And this book (among many others I am now dipping into) proves it.
Yes poetry, but wonderfully accessible and accentuated by snippets of stories, and dime store books, and an interview"; photographs too.
It's violent, visceral and completely engaging (despite the fact that I was not in the least interested in Bonney).
It is a thrilling joy ride.

A book every bit as exalted and brutal as  Blood Meridian, if slightly narrower in scope; it delineates a world in which life is cheap and short, and in which legend looms large.

This is a portrait of Billy the Kid as reflected in a thousand pieces of a shattered mirror. The book is composed of vignettes, poems, photos, and fragments of prose, each of which is a little stroke of brilliance and all of which together paint an incredibly rich, violent, and moving portrait of this young man and his legend. Ondaatje is quite a conjurer here.

“I don’t know whether I’m happy or not. But in the end that is all that’s important—that you keep testing yourself, as you say—experimenting on how good you are, and you can’t do that when you want to lose.”

Visceral and poetic portrait of Billy the Kid. There were moments where I didn’t have a complete grasp of what was going on, but allowed myself to just be propelled forward. An afternoon’s read, probably best enjoyed in one long session. I’ll be reading this again.

Fantastic, short, like a lesson in freedom for novelists.

Traditional novels starring legendary figures out of history often fill in too many of the blanks, either inflating the legend further with far-fetched inventions or deflating the legend with mundane, unnecessary details. This book does not try to fill in all the spaces, it's a brief assemblage of images and graphic episodes. It's imperfect and difficult to follow, but so was Billy the Kid.

I love his ugly-ass smiling portrait.

Ondaatje did this same exercise with Buddy Bolden, the seminal jazz trumpeter of New Orleans. He should probably do one on some notable prostitute, that way he could have a trilogy of prose poem/fuzzy photograph collages of the scruffy characters of yore Americans lionize (artist/outlaw/prostitute).

Sono sempre stato sensibile al fascino del western, e il miglior complimento che potrei fare a un libro come questo è che gli manca solo la musica: quella di Morricone. Qui c’è un mito, quello di Billy the Kid, un vero Achille piè veloce americano, a cui viene data una voce mozzata, singhiozzante, lirica e polverosa. Un viaggio vorticoso nella mente del fuorilegge da mettere nello scaffale accanto ai romanzi di Cormac McCarthy, a “Nebraska” di Springsteen e al DVD di “The Hateful Eight”.

Michael Ondaatje is certainly one of the world's greatest living writers. My admiration for his writing craft is boundless but I will nonetheless attempt at a dispirited review of his first novel-ish publication. Although this is his first "novel" (more on novel(ish)ness later), it ranks among his most unabashedly avant-garde next to The English Patient and his most recent Divisadero. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is one of the earliest attempts in North American letters at revising the Wild West mythos. The Revisionist Western is, again, one of my favorite sub-genres of all time, but I am still attempting objectivity. This novel(ish) piece of writing takes a stab at demythologizing the outlaw/bandit/freedom fighter archetype of which, for almost a century, Billy the Kid belonged to. It is intensely violent but this violence is offset by an, at times, strikingly humanized portrayal of a violent murderer. Similarly (or perhaps contrarily), Billy's portrayal is at times maddeningly animalistic. So too is Ondaatje's novel(ish). It garners its power by oscillating amongst historical record, first person narrative, eye-witness accounts, dime-store novel, photography and most interestingly, poems which are intended to be read as if Billy the Kid wrote them (which of course he didn't). Though it can be dizzying at times while at other times being stomach-churningly violent, this book is a must read for fans of the genre as well as fans of Ondaatje's peculiar, non-linear, pastiche narrative style.