2020 AMERICAN BOOK AWARD WINNER "The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman is the most comprehensive selection of his verse to date, a volume that contains a lot of previously uncollected work. ... this book makes a case for him as a perceptive and eccentric American original, a man who seems to have fallen out of the sky like a meteor."-The New York Times "The body of work is small but voluminous in intensity, spirit and soul, with a lineage that runs from Charles Baudelaire to Charles Mingus. Kaufman-with his commitment to the art, his surreal eye on the urban experience and beyond it, and his jazz timing-brings San Francisco to life."-San Francisco Chronicle "Twentieth-century American poetry cannot be fully comprehended without Bob Kaufman. City Lights and the editors do a grand service to literature by publishing Kaufman's poetry in one collection. ... This is a necessary gift for poets and poetry readers."-Booklist "He was an original voice. No one else talked like him. No one else wrote poetry like him."-Lawrence Ferlinghetti Bob Kaufman (1925-1986) was one of the most important-and most original-poets of the twentieth century. He is among the inaugurators of what today is characterized as the Afro-Surreal, uniting the surrealist practice of automatic writing with the jazz concept of spontaneous composition. He seldom wrote his poems down and often discarded those he did, leaving them to be rescued by others. He was also a legendary figure of the Beat Generation, known as much for hopping on tables to declaim his poetry as for maintaining a monastic silence for months or even years at a time. Kaufman produced just three broadsides and three books in his lifetime. In 1967, Golden Sardine was published by City Lights in its famed Pocket Poets Series, and became an instant cult classic. Collected Poems is a landmark poetic achievement, bringing together all of Kaufman's known surviving poems, including an extensive section of previously uncollected work, in a long overdue return to City Lights Books. Praise for Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman: "Bob Kaufman volcanically en-veined the Beats as a mirage enveloped Surrealist; not as a formal poet, but one, like Rimbaud, who embodied butane. Following the scent of his butane on one anonymous North Beach afternoon led Philip Lamantia to audibly utter to me that Bob Kaufman as per incandescent singularity is 'our poet.'"-Will Alexander, author of Compression & Purity "Bob Kaufman is one of our most vulnerable, mysterious, and beautiful poets, a nomadic maudit, surrealist saint of the streets, votary of silence, the consummate Outrider with trickster imagination and visionary power."-Anne Waldman, author of Trickster Feminism "Uplifting the voice of this under-sung literary master to future's light is the mission of the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman. This poet's poet on the cliff edge of no ledge is still continuing to foster new surrealizations. Read this bebopian wordsmith, his pen turned saxophone and ink notes that are black tears."-Kamau Daaood, author of The Language of Saxophones "To call these poems 'surreal' seems, now, to muffle Kaufman's prophetic genius. He saw us, our images in pools of blood, milk, and saxophone spittle. Maybe it was ever our shivering made the ripples that distorted the reflections."-Douglas Kearney, author of Buck Studies "Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman should finally liberate the kaleidoscopic surrealism of this San Franciscan, and in many respects, secular Franciscan, poet from the shadows of Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats. ... Collected Poems is a memoriam of unmitigated joy and abysmal despair."-Tyrone Williams, author of As iZ

"No one mulling this gentle record will fail to be moved." -San Francisco Chronicle Poet, publisher, bookseller, activist-this is the story of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the bookshop he made a landmark in San Francisco, and a life beautifully lived with writers and books. In the mid-1950s a group of San Francisco-based writers emerged as a central force in American letters. Self-styled bohemians, disillusioned with the old American dream of prosperity and conformity, they harangued these "virtues" in their writings. They became known as the Beat Generation. Their ranks included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso. But the unifying force among them was an unassuming, almost painfully shy young poet named Lawrence Ferlinghetti. As owner of the now legendary City Lights Booksellers and its publishing enterprises, City Lights Publishers and its Pocket Poet Series, Ferlinghetti promoted the writings of his rebellious contemporaries, and continually looked for new talent to publish, while conducting a parallel though more personal search for self-identity through his own work. Although that search began with a lonely, unstable childhood in which he never knew his real parents, it would not become manifest until years later with the 1958 publication of his first collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind-that debut would go on to sell more than one million copies and become one of the bestselling and most popular books of poetry ever published. In this, the first biography of Ferlinghetti ever published (originally released in 1979), Neeli Cherkovski recreates those early years of the poet-publisher and examines the content and import of his work. Long out-of-print, this is a crucial literary document by a man who knew the legendary poet-publisher-bookseller intimately. This expanded edition-published just one year after Ferlinghetti's passing in 2021 at the age of 101-includes a fascinating, hilarious new foreword about how the book came to be written in the late 1970s, an epilogue covering the last forty years of Ferlinghetti's life, and a personal, tender afterword about the long relationship between the author and his subject. For readers interested in American culture and how a business can make social change, this is an irresistible story of a long life very well lived.

The life of Charles Bukowski-laureate of lowlife Los Angeles-a novelist and poet who wrote as he lived. This is the only biography of Bukowski written by a close friend and collaborator. Neeli Cherkovski began a deep friendship with Bukowski in the 1960s while guzzling beer at wrestling matches or during quieter evenings discussing life and literature in Bukowski's East Hollywood apartment. Over the decades, those hundreds of conversations took shape as this biography-now with a new preface, "This Thing Upon Me Is Not Death: Reflections on the Centennial of Charles Bukowski." Bukowski, author of Ham on Rye, Post Office, and other bestselling novels, short stories, and poetry collections only ever wanted to be a writer. Maybe that's why Bukowski's voice is so real and immediate that readers felt included in a conversation. "In his written work, he's a hero, a fall guy, a comic character, a womanizing lush, a wise old dog," biographer Neeli Cherkovski writes. "His readers do more than glimpse his many-sidedness. For some, it's a deep experience. They feel as if his writing opens places inside of themselves they might never have seen otherwise. Often a reader comes away feeling heroic, because the poet has shown them that their ordinary lives are imbued with drama." Full of anecdotes, wisdom, humor, and insight, this is an essential companion to the work of a great American writer. Long-time Bukowski fans will come away with fresh insights while readers new to his work will find this an exhilarating introduction. "In his death, I hear him clearly," Cherkovski writes. "His voice comes to me resonant, full of unforced authority, a message of endurance, self-reliance, and honesty of expression. At the same time, he is also saying, 'Poetry is a dirty dishrag. Keep laughing at yourself on the way out the door.' "