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“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author
“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter
The Roominghouse Madrigals is a selection of poetry from Charles Bukowski's early work. It shows a slightly softer side to the beloved barfly.
Drawn from his raw, prolific period between 1946 and 1966, this is the early work of a cult classic author in the making.
- Dirty Realism: Find Bukowski in the cheap rooming houses, factories, and bars of a forgotten Los Angeles, writing with unflinching honesty about the grit of survival.
- Confessional Poetry: Raw, first-person accounts of love, liquor, loneliness, and the defiant struggle to create art against all odds.
- Raw and Unfiltered Verse: Written on first impulse with no revisions, these poems capture the immediate, explosive energy that would become his signature style.
- The Softer Side of the Barfly: Before the legend, there was the lyricism. Discover a more vulnerable, reflective current in the work that established the "Walt Whitman of Los Angeles."
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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