V. Vale and Andrea Juno's 'Modern Primitives' (1989), published by RE/Search in San Francisco, collected interviews with tattooed, pierced, and scarified individuals including Fakir Musafar, tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy, and performance artist Bob Flanagan, framing body modification as a countercultural and spiritual inquiry into human limits. The book became an underground classic that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and is widely credited with launching the body modification 'renaissance' of the 1990s. Its publication marked the moment body modification entered serious intellectual and artistic discourse in the English-speaking world.

Modern Primitives functioned partly as a literary and philosophical text, drawing on anthropology, psychoanalysis, and performance theory to make the case for body modification as a form of intentional self-authorship. Its influence on performance poetry, spoken word, and the literary body art scene of the 1990s was substantial; poets such as Sapphire and Maggie Nelson subsequently wrote within a theoretical framework about the body that Modern Primitives helped establish. The book's treatment of pain, transformation, and self-inscription provided vocabulary for a generation of poets writing about embodiment, trauma, and the politics of the flesh.