Essential Bukowski

What it is about

This selected volume gathers poems from across Charles Bukowski’s career, bringing together barrooms, rented rooms, racetracks, labor, illness, solitude, failure, persistence, and flashes of tenderness. The plainspoken surface is carefully timed: repetition, enjambment, tonal reversal, and self-mythologizing create a voice more constructed than it first appears. Its place here is personal: I want the argument to meet the life I am actually living.

Why I keep it

The essential ones, for lending.

Key ideas

Beside it on the shelf · Poetry