Essential Bukowski: Poetry

‘The best poet in America’ Jean Genet

‘He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels’ Leonard Cohen

The definitive collection from a writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark

Here is Bukowski eating walnuts and scratching his back, rolling a cigarette while listening to Brahms, showering with Linda in the mid-afternoon.

Here is Bukowski knowing that the secret is beyond him, that people who never go crazy live truly horrible lives, that there’s a bluebird in his heart that wants to get out.

Here is Bukowski at his most hilarious and heart-breaking, his most raw and profound; here is Bukowski at his best.

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Charles Bukowski
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.
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