The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps
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A posthumous masterwork of raw grit, racetrack bets, and cheap rooms.
This collection of previously unpublished poems offers the author's take on squabbling neighbours, off-kilter lovers, would-be hangers-on, and the loneliness of a man afflicted with acute powers of observation.
The volume gathers late-career work tracing decades across Los Angeles, moving from dingy Hollywood apartments along DeLongpre Avenue to a sunlit home in San Pedro.
Bukowski revisits graveyard-shift factory lines, the betting windows at Santa Anita and Del Mar, and the strained compromises of domestic life.
The poems track a life stripped of ceremony, recording the wear and tear of low-rent rooming houses and the stubborn endurance of ordinary survival.
The tone is gritty and amusing, spiralling out towards a cock-eyed wisdom.
- American Poetry: Late-career verses capturing late-night typing sessions in San Pedro.
- Everyday Survival: Verses capturing stubborn strays in the yard.
- Unsentimental Humor: Clear-eyed assessments of literary pretensions and eccentric rooming-house landlords.
- Also by This Author: You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense, Love is a Dog From Hell and The Last Night of the Earth Poems.
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.
More by Charles Bukowski
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