LAST CALL Format: Paperback

Prolific poet, award-winning translator, esteemed critic—“certainly the best poetry critic in sight,” according to Lawrence Ferlinghetti—essayist and journalist, editor and novelist, Stephen Kessler has been a constant creative force in the American literary counterculture for more than fifty years. In Last Call Kessler records with grief and wit, documentary realism and ranging imagination, poignancy , irony, and reflection a journey through the gains and losses of a lifetime. His emotional honesty, conversational lyricism and wry melancholy are down to earth, heart-opening and consciousness-wrenching, retro-romantic and totally contemporary. Open this book to any page and find the unmistakably authentic voice of Stephen Kessler.

Prolific poet, award-winning translator, esteemed critic—“certainly the best poetry critic in sight,” according to Lawrence Ferlinghetti—essayist and journalist, editor and novelist, Stephen Kessler has been a constant creative force in the American literary counterculture for more than fifty years.

Stephen Kessler is a writer living in California. He is the author of ten books of original poetry, sixteen books of literary translation, three collections of essays, and a novel, The Mental Traveler.

Stephen Kessler was the editor of The Redwood Coast Review, four-time winner of the California Library Association's PR Excellence Award, from 1999 through 2014. He is editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Classics, 2010). He has edited several other independent periodicals over the past fifty years, among them the Santa Cruz newsweekly The Sun, the monthly Mendocino County Outlook, and the international journal Alcatraz.

As a translator Stephen Kessler has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Poetry, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Center USA Literary Award for his versions of the three most comprehensive volumes in English of the poetry of Luis Cernuda.