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Play the piano drunk like a percussion instrument until the fingers begin to bleed a bit
125 pages
A gritty, smoke-stained dispatch from the dive bars and cheap apartments of Los Angeles, finding bruised poetry in the gutter.
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 man tell you the unvarnished truth about his life. The pace is brisk and punchy, driven by stripped-down, colloquial free verse that completely ignores academic pretension. It is a deeply gritty, smoke-stained experience, steeped in the melancholic reality of cheap apartments, dead-end jobs, and bottomless bottles. Yet, beneath the cynical, world-weary tone and the unapologetic crudeness, there are sudden, startling flashes of bruised vulnerability and dark comedy. It will delight readers who crave raw, anti-romantic literature that finds a strange, enduring beauty in the absolute margins of society.
- Mood
- gritty
- smoke-stained
- melancholic
- seedy
- Tone
- cynical
- raw
- darkly comedic
- unapologetic
- world-weary
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- urban alienation · the drudgery of work · alcoholism · fleeting lust · absurdity of existence
- The writing
- Stripped-down, colloquial, and aggressively direct free verse that reads like a late-night confession.
- The arc
- Moves from a cynical, drunken detachment to sudden flashes of raw vulnerability, ultimately settling into a weary acceptance of life's grit.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave unvarnished, anti-academic poetry that finds bruised beauty in the gutter and dark humor in despair.
Content notes
- alcoholism
- sexual content
- coarse language
- 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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