Books › Dangling in the tournefortia
Dangling in the tournefortia
281 pages
A raw, smoke-stained dispatch from the dive bars of the soul, finding bruised beauty in the ugly realities of aging and excess.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like sitting in a dimly lit dive bar at 2 AM, listening to a brilliant, broken man tell you the unvarnished truth about his life. The pace is brisk, driven by stripped-down, conversational lines that hit with blunt force and refuse to hide behind poetic artifice. The mood is undeniably gritty and smoke-filled, steeped in a world-weary cynicism that occasionally parts to reveal a startling, aching vulnerability. It explores the absurdity of existence, the drudgery of the everyday, and the heavy reality of aging with a sardonic smirk and a glass in hand. This is a book for readers who crave raw honesty and find a strange, bruised grace in the gutters of human experience.
- Mood
- gritty
- melancholic
- smoke-filled
- nocturnal
- Tone
- cynical
- world-weary
- blunt
- sardonic
- vulnerable
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- aging and mortality · the absurdity of existence · alcoholism and excess · fleeting moments of grace · working-class drudgery
- The writing
- Stripped-down, conversational, and fiercely unpretentious, relying on blunt force rather than traditional poetic ornamentation.
- The arc
- Begins with a hardened, cynical detachment from the world and slowly reveals a quiet, aching vulnerability regarding aging and the passage of time.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave raw, unvarnished honesty and find a strange, bruised beauty in the dive bars and gutters of everyday life.
Content notes
- alcoholism
- coarse language
- sexual content
- misogyny
- depression
About the book
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 Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp (1994).
Description from Open Library.
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