Play the Piano
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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
Play the Piano introduces Charles Bukowski's poetry from the 1970s. He leads a life full of gambling and booze but also finds love. These poems are full of lechery and romance as he struggles to mature.
This is Bukowski at his most vulnerable and vicious.
- Raw and Honest Poetry: Poems that stare into the abyss of a life filled with lechery, romance, and the brutal struggle to find meaning.
- Los Angeles Poet: Experience the gritty, sun-bleached streets of L.A. through the eyes of its most notorious and unflinching chronicler.
- Poems about Love and Loss: A tender and savage look at human connection, where love is found, fumbled, and fought for in cheap rooms and smoky bars.
- American Beat Poetry: Unfiltered verse fueled by whiskey, racetrack bets, and the defiant spirit of an underground literary legend.
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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