Bone Palace Ballet
About this ebook
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.
Bukowski charts his progression from reading books under bedsheets to brawling in back alleys and nursing split knuckles in Los Angeles bars. Rented rooms in Philadelphia frame his hungry twenties, listening to Brahms in the dark and piling up pounds of rejected manuscripts.
These late poems follow the author to his San Pedro desk, chronicling nights at the keyboard with classical radio, pacing cats, and red wine. The volume captures an appetite for racetrack betting, cheap motels, and grit as time narrows to the final wire.
- Raw Honesty: Bukowski details tense encounters in city holding cells, calming an agitated inmate through a wire screen with a shared cigarette.
- Poetry with Edge: Verses capture an afternoon standoff in a Cheyenne watering hole, facing down boot-wearing locals over quiet draughts.
- Against the Odds: The poet recounts attending his young daughter’s weekend art class at Barnsdall Park and watching children release colorful balloons.
- Literary Collections: Later pieces candidly chronicle computer crashes, lost drafts, and the reliable comfort of an old mechanical typewriter.
- 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.
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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.
