Slouching Toward Nirvana: New Poems - Softcover

Bukowski, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060577045 ISBN 13: 9780060577049

Publisher: Ecco, 2006

Synopsis

in this place

there are the dead, the deadly and the dying.

there is the cross, the builders of the cross and the burners of the

cross.

the pattern of my life forms like a cheap shadow

on the wall before me.

my love

what is left of it

now must crawl

to wherever it can crawl.

the strongest know that death is

final

and the happiest are those gifted with the

shortest journey.

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.

From Booklist

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: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0060577045
• ISBN 13: 9780060577049
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288