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Love Is a Dog from Hell
Poems, 1974-1977
312 pages
A raw, hungover dispatch from the neon-lit gutters of romance and heartbreak.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like sitting in a dimly lit dive bar at two in the morning, listening to a brilliant, broken regular spill his guts over a cheap beer. The pace is brisk and punchy, driven by stripped-down, conversational free verse that refuses to dress up its pain in pretty metaphors. It is a deeply cynical, hungover atmosphere, soaked in the grime of cheap apartments and failed romances. Yet, beneath the aggressive misanthropy and unapologetic grit, there is a bruised, reluctant tenderness. The emotional journey drags you through the messy, unglamorous realities of lust, loneliness, and self-destruction, offering fleeting moments of stark clarity. It is perfect for readers who crave unfiltered realism and find a strange, dark comfort in the absolute bottom of the human heart.
- Mood
- dive-bar smoky
- hungover
- melancholic
- desolate
- Tone
- cynical
- raw
- darkly comedic
- unapologetic
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- the agony of romance · loneliness and isolation · alcoholism · the drudgery of existence · self-destruction
- The writing
- Stripped-down, unpretentious, and aggressively direct free verse that reads like a late-night confession.
- The arc
- A descent into the messy, painful realities of love and lust, punctuated by moments of stark, cynical clarity and reluctant tenderness.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave unfiltered, gritty realism and find comfort in the messy, unglamorous underbelly of human emotion.
Content notes
- alcoholism
- 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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