Pictures of the Gone World


Lawrence Ferlinghetti - 1955
    The original edition contained the first twenty-seven poems to which the author has now added eighteen new verses.Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books, author of A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World, among numerous other books, has been drawing from life since his student days in Paris where he frequented the Academie Julien and where he did his first oil painting.

April Galleons


John Ashbery - 1987
    With breathtaking freshness, he writes of mutability, of the passage of time, and of growth, decay, and death as they are reflected in both ourselves and the changing of the seasons. By turns playful, melancholy, and mysterious, the poems in "April Galleons" reaffirm the extraordinary powers that have made Ashbery such a significant figure in the American literary landscape.

One Times One


E.E. Cummings - 1944
    The poems in One Times One have as their theme "oneness and the means (one times one) whereby that oneness is achieved—love," in the words of Cummings's biographer Richard S. Kennedy. Besides new expressions of universal concerns, Cummings writes here in a lyric and optimistic mode, drawing portraits of people dear to him in New Hampshire and New York City's Greenwich Village. This new edition joins other individual uniform Liveright paperback volumes drawn from the Complete Poems, most recently Etcetera and 22 and 50 Poems.

Pete, Drinker of Blood


Scott S. Phillips - 2012
    He’s also a vampire. He lives alone and avoids the other vampires in L.A., but Pete’s simple life goes haywire when he falls for Angie, the cute bartender at a Sunset Strip dive -- and when sinister vampire lord Carson Fitzgerald returns to claim his children, Pete learns that nothing's ever easy for a creature of the night.

Scattered Poems


Jack Kerouac - 1971
    Spontaneous poetry by the author of On the Road, gathered from underground and ephemeral publications; including “San Francisco Blues,” the variant texts of “Pull My Daisy,” and American haiku.HERE DOWN ON DARK EARTH before we all go to Heaven VISIONS OF AMERICA All that hitchhikin All that railroadin All that comin back to America —Jack Kerouac

On Love


Charles Bukowski - 2016
    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.

Plutonian Ode and Other Poems


Allen Ginsberg - 1981
    Following poems chronologies Wyoming grass blues, a punk-rock sonnet, personal grave musing, Manhattan landscape hypertension, lovelorn heart thumps, mantric rhymes, Neruda’s tearful Lincoln ode retranslated to U.S. vernacular oratory, Nagasaki Bomb anniversary haikus, Zen Bluegrass raunch, free verse demystification of sacred fame, Reznikoffian filial epiphanies, hot pants Skeltonic doggerel, a Kerouackian New Year’s eve ditty, professional homework, New Jersey quatrains, scarecrow haiku, improvised dice roll for high school kids, English rock-and-roll sophistications, an old love glimpse, little German movies, old queen conclusions, a tender renaissance song, ode to hero-flop, Peace protest prophecies, Lower East Side snapshots, national flashed in the Buddhafields, Sapphic stanzas in quantitative idiom, look out at the bedroom window, feverish birdbrain verses from Eastern Europe for chanting with electric bands, Beethovinean ear strophes drowned in rain, a glance at Cloud Castle, poems 1977-1980 end with International new wave hit lyric Capitol Air"“Plutonian Ode” has the best of intentions . . . [I]t is perhaps the most complete package of political action from poem to protest." —Marc Olmstead, Sensitive Skin MagazineFamous Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was born June 3, 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg, Russian émigré, and Louis Ginsberg, lyric poet and school teacher, in Paterson, N.J. To these facts Ginsberg adds: "High school in Paterson till 17, Columbia College, merchant marine, Texas and Denver copyboy, Times Square, amigos in jail, dishwashing, book reviews, Mexico City, market research, Satori in Harlem, Yucatan and Chiapas 1954, West Coast 3 years. Later Arctic Sea trip, Tangier, Venice, Amsterdam, Paris, read at Oxford Harvard Columbia Chicago, quit, wrote "Kaddish" 1959, made tape to leave behind & fade in Orient awhile." His other famous poetry collections including The Fall of America, Howl, Mind Breaths, Plutonian Ode, and Reality Sandwiches are also published by City Lights Publishers.

Elegiac Feelings American


Gregory Corso - 1970
    The title poem is a tribute to Jack Kerouac, fusing a memorial to the poet's dead friend with a bitter lament for the present state of America. Reproduced in facsimile from Corso's handwritten sheets, his marginal decorations, drawings and glyphs are included. The balance of the book is drawn from his shorter poems.

The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster


Richard Brautigan - 1968
    The poems are written in clear, straightforward free verse. Here is an example of his style from "The Chinese Checker Players": "When I was six years old/I played Chinese checkers/with a woman/who was ninety-three years old."Recurrent themes in the book include love, sex, loss & loneliness. Incorporated throughout are an intriguing mix of pop & 'high' culture references: Jefferson Airplane, Ophelia, the New York Yankees, John Donne etc. The book often has an earthy flavor. He writes about such topics as his own penis or the smell of a fart. Some particularly memorable poems include the following:"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," a sci-fi vision of a "cybernetic meadow"; the open-ended "Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4"; "Discovery," a joyful poem about sexual intimacy; the surreal "The Pumpkin Tide"; the funny, haiku-like "November 3"; & "A Good-Talking Candle," which invites readers into altered states of perception. Altho most of the poems are very short, there is one longer poem: the 9-part, 9-page "the Galilee Hitch-hiker," which chronicles the surreal adventures of Baudelaire — among other experiences, he opens an unconventional hamburger stand in San Francisco. If you only know Brautigan from his weird & wonderful novels, read this collection.-Michael Mazza (edited)

The Men From P.I.G. And R.O.B.O.T.


Harry Harrison - 1968
    And none have more dangerous assignments than those from the P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T. battalions!The time has come when the Patrol is spread too thinly around the galaxy. New planets are constantly being colonized, bringing fresh problems of law-enforcement and defence against alien attack.So new solutions are sought: like the setting-up of special units called P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T. - units that are self supporting and equipped to handle even the most dangerous situations.These two stories show Harry Harison at his best: fast, inventive and exciting.

The Plummeting Old Women


Daniil Kharms - 1989
    These texts are characterized by a startling and macabre novelty, with elements of the grotesque, fantastic and child-like touching the imagination of the everyday. They express the cultural landscape of Stalinism -- years of show trials, mass atrocities and stifled political life. Their painful, unsettling eloquence testify to the humane and the comic in this absurdist writer's work. The translator Neil Cornwall gives a biographical introduction to his subject, enlarged upon by the poet Hugh Maxton in a contextual assessment of the writing of Flann O'Brien, Le Fanu and Doyle, and of their shared concerns with detective fiction, terror and death. Daniil Kharms 91905-42) died under Stalin. Along with fellow poets and prose-writers of the era -- Khlebnikov, Biely, Mandelstam, Zabolotsky and Pasternak -- he is one of the emerging experimentalists of Russian modernism.

Elite Dangerous: Docking is Difficult


Gideon Defoe - 2014
    One of three very distinct - but subtly linked - novels written by major authors who are fans of the game, this novel will be a must-buy not only the 25,000+ people who funded the new game on kickstarter, but also for all of those fans of the original game.On what might be the worst planet in the universe, a young man dreams of the stars. Adventure! Lasers! Women! And the ultimate goal - to become Elite!Unfortunately, Misha has to do his chores first. And learn how to talk to Phoebe, the beautiful customs officer. And leave the planet.But the death of a famous author unexpectedly drags Misha and Phoebe into a system-wide conspiracy, complete with smuggling, international art thieves, multi-system corporations, canapŽs and exploding pigs. This is Misha's chance to prove he has what it takes!After all, surely anyone can be Elite if they dream...

The Best American Poetry 2005


Paul Muldoon - 1990
    Paul Muldoon, the distinguished poet and international literary eminence, has selected -- from a pool of several thousand published candidates -- the top seventy-five poems of the year. With insightful comments from the poets illuminating their work, and series editor David Lehman's perspicacious foreword, The Best American Poetry 2005 is indispensable for every poetry enthusiast.

First Course In Turbulence


Dean Young - 1999
    Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.

Shroud of the Gnome


James Tate - 1997
    "Shroud of the Gnome" is a bravura performance in Tate's signature style: playful, wicked, deliriously sober, charming, and dazzling. Here, once again, one of America's most masterful poets celebrates the inexplicable in his own strange tongue.