On Love

Charles Bukowski

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062396020
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Letters

A companion to On Writing and On Cats: A raw and tender poetry collection that captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable, on a subject that hits home with all of us.

Charles Bukowski was a man of intense emotions, someone an editor once called a "passionate madman." In On Love, we see Bukowski reckoning with the complications and exaltations of love, lust, and desire. Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love—its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power.

Bukowski is brilliant on love—often amusing, sometimes playful, and fleetingly sweet. On Love offers deep insight into Bukowski the man and the artist; whether writing about his daughter, his lover, his friends, or his work, he is piercingly honest and poignantly reflective, using love as a prism to see the world in all its beauty and cruelty, and his own fragile place in it. "My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, " he writes, "as the same cat crouches."

Brutally honest, flecked with humor and pathos, On Love reveals Bukowski at his most candid and affecting.

Contents

1. mine
2. layover
3. the day I kicked a bankroll out the window
4. I taste the ashes of your death
5. love is a piece of paper torn to bits
6. to the whore who took my poems
7. shoes
8. a real thing, a good woman
9. one night stand
10. the mischief of expiration
11. love is a form of selfishness
12. for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough
13. for Jane
14. notice
15. my real love in Athens
16. sleeping woman
17. a party here—machineguns, tanks, an army fighting against men on rooftops
18. for the 18 months of Marina Louise
19. poem for my daughter
20. answer to a note found in the mailbox
21. all the love of me goes out to her (for A.M.)
22. an answer to a critic of sorts
23. the shower
24. 2 carnations
25. have you ever kissed a panther?
26. the best love poem I can write at the moment
27. balling
28. hot
29. smiling, shining, singing
30. visit to Venice
31. love poem to Marina
32. I can hear the sound of hum...