Essential Bukowski: Poetry

Charles Bukowski, Abel Debritto

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780008225162
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

'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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• friendly advice to a lot of young men, and a lot of old men, too
• as the sparrow
• layover
• the life of Borodin
• when Hugo Wolf went mad
• destroying beauty
• the day i kicked a bankroll out the window
• the twins
• to the whore who took my poems
• the loser
• the best way to get famous is to run away
• the tragedy of the leaves
• old man, dead in a room
• the priest and the matador
• the state of world affairs from a 3rd floor window
• the swan
• beans with garlic
• a poem is a city
• consummation of grief
• for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough
• for Jane
• john dillinger and le chasseur maudit
• crucifix in a deathhand
• something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you . . .
• no. 6
• and the moon and the stars and the world:
• true story
• the genius of the crowd
• I met a genius
• swastika star buttoned to my ass
• the blackbirds are rough today
• If we take—
• another academy
• the poetry reading
• the last days of the suicide kid
• the shower
• the mockingbird
• style
• girl in a miniskirt reading the Bible outside my window
• the shoelace
• those sons of bitches
• hot
• trouble with Spain
• a radio with guts
• some people never go crazy
• the fisherman
• the trash men
• face of a political candidate on a street billboard
• the proud thin dying
• an almost made up poem
• a love poem for all the women i have known
• art
• what they want
• one for the shoeshine man
• the meek have inherited
• who in the hell is Tom Jones?
• and a horse with greenblue eyes walks on the sun
• an acceptance slip
• the end of a short affair
• I made a mistake
• $$$$$$
• metamorphosis
• we’ve got to communicate
• the secret of my endurance
• Carson McCullers
• sparks
• the history of a tough motherfucker
• oh, yes
• retirement
• luck
• cornered
• how is your heart?
• the burning of the dream
• hell is a lonely place
• the strongest of the strange
• 8 count
• we ain’t got no money, honey, but we got rain
• flophouse
• the soldier, his wife and the bum
• no leaders
• Dinosauria, we
• nirvana
• the bluebird
• the secret
• fan letter
• to lean back into it
• the condition book
• a new war
• the laughing heart
• roll the dice
• so now?
• the crunch
• Sources
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Also by Charles Bukowski
• About the Publisher