Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems - Hardcover

Bukowski, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060577037 ISBN 13: 9780060577032

Publisher: Ecco, 2005

Synopsis

“Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and The Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural language. Bukowski moved it a little farther.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter

Los Angeles slums, bars, and more are featured in Slouching Toward Nirvana, the third of five books of unpublished poems from Charles Bukowski, considered by many to be America’s most imitated and influential poet.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.

Reviews

Bukowski's posthumous productivity continues, this time giving us one of his best collections, thanks for which are perhaps due to the editorial labors of John Martin, who closed down his long-running Black Sparrow Press a few years back but maintained his interest in his meat-and-potatoes author. Like many another Buk collection, this one comes in four parts. To see just how good it is, turn to part 2, indicatively introduced by these lines: "There's a lioness / down the hallway // put on your lion's mask / and wait." The section's theme is women: Buk's women, lioness-like, indeed. Approach with caution or, better, as he says, wait. Beauty or, like Buk, beast, each is as sexy, feisty, crude, and smart (sometimes) as he is. These seemingly artless (you try to write anything good in Bukowski's dribble-down-the-page free style) rants, matched here in force and humor by the ones not about women, are the poetic analogs of the man-woman stuff in the pages of tough-guy novelists from Spillane and Thompson^B to Leonard. Ray Olson
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0060577037
• ISBN 13: 9780060577032
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288