The Perfect Childhood combines an overview of Clark’s work-ranging from collages and found images to photographs from his native Oklahoma in the late 1960s. Material from the past 30 years is combined to create a single work of art, an overwhelming testament to the consistency of Clark’s artistic vision. The book is as raunchy and brutally straightforward as it is melancholy and affectionate. Its attitude will confound all those thinking in comfortable and complacent opposites-gay and straight, creative and destructive, tenderness and violence, good and evil.