Bone Palace Ballet

by Charles Bukowski

Overview

This is a collection of 175 previously unpublished works by Bukowski. It contains yarns about his childhood in the Depression and his early literary passions, his apprentice days as a hard-drinking, starving poetic aspirant, and his later years when he looks back at fate with defiance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781574230284
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/22/2002
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.92(d)

About the Author

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.

Date of Birth:

August 16, 1920

Date of Death:

March 9, 1994

Place of Birth:

Andernach, Germany

Place of Death:

San Pedro, California

Education:

Los Angeles City College, 2 years

Editorial Reviews

Even as he approached death, Bukowski (1920-1994) remained a poet contemptuous of transcendence. From its first section, "As Young As We Were Ever Going to Get," to its last, "the big guy doesn't have me out of here yet," this posthumous collection of new poems revels in the substance of thoroughly earthyand often sordidexperiences. Bukowski chronicles his own lusts, bad behavior and wry observations. The first section shows the young Bukowski staring up the skirt of a sexy English teacher and discovering the comfort of literature in his early dysfunctional home. The second section, "the streets were all I saw," tells stories from Bukowski's early adulthood, when he spent his time starving "in a roominghouse and/ pretending to be a writer." Not surprisingly, Bukowski (Betting on the Muse, etc.) romanticizes the visits to whores and barroom escapades, remembering his drunken youth as a time when there was a "feeling of/ joy and gamble in/ the air." The third and fourth sections contain stories from his adulthood and some startlingly clear impressionistic sketches. In the final section, Bukowski stares down the reaper and takes stock. Receiving bags full of letters telling him "what a great writer I am," he confesses, "I read everything, dump every-/ thing, go about my/ business.// I am aware that no man is/ a `great' writer." It's this kind of unadorned self-awareness that allows Bukowski to observe the world, have a laugh and mind his own businessall the while reeling off memorably candid poems that don't take themselves too seriously. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This posthumous collection of poems by Bukowski (Pulp, LJ 6/1/96) is a wonderful swan song. The settings remain mostly the sametaprooms, race tracks, and back alleysand the themes largely unchangedfragile relationships, heavy drinking, and the art of writing. However, one new theme that surfaces in this collection is the acceptance of death and old age. Bukowski knows he faces death and seeks "the grave to find a more/ comfortable/ position." He realizes that death will be his final act, and he will be "alone but not lonely." Accepting it, he writes with clarity and precision"I will write the stuff only for myself/ and to myself"and goes on to realize that in death he will "no longer defile these pages/ with my raw and simple/ lines." The only drawback of this work lies in a handful of weaker poems that show Bukowski attempting to be clever, and this is when he fails. For the most part, however, readers will see Bukowski at his best. Highly recommended.Tim Gavin, Episcopal Acad., Merion, Pa.

Library Journal