( Charles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You...)
Charles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You Get So Alone at Times, a book of poetry that reveals his tender side. He delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions.
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( "It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski ...)
"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than twelve years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers. This classic 1971 novelthe one that catapulted its author to national fameis the perfect introduction to the grimly hysterical world of legendary writer, poet, and Dirty Old Man Charles Bukowski and his fictional alter ego, Chinaski.
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( First published in 1977, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a c...)
First published in 1977, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a collection of Bukowski's poetry from the mid-seventies. A classic in the Bukowski canon, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a raw, lyrical, exploration of the exigencies, heartbreaks, and limits of love.
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( One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deli...)
One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next. Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.
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( Edited by Abel Debritto, the definitive collection of p...)
Edited by Abel Debritto, the definitive collection of poems from an influential writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, and acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark on modern culture. Few writers have so brilliantly and poignantly conjured the desperation and absurdity of ordinary life as Charles Bukowski. Resonant with his powerful, perceptive voice, his visceral, hilarious, and transcendent poetry speaks to us as forcefully today as when it was written. Encompassing a wide range of subjectsfrom love to death and sex to writingBukowskis unvarnished and self-deprecating verse illuminates the deepest and most enduring concerns of the human condition while remaining sharply aware of the day to day. With his acute eye for the ridiculous and the troubled, Bukowski speaks to the deepest longings and strangest predilections of the human experience. Gloomy yet hopeful, this is tough, unrelenting poetry touched by grace. This is Essential Bukowski.
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( A timeless selection of some of Charles Bukowskis best...)
A timeless selection of some of Charles Bukowskis best unpublished and uncollected poems Charles Bukowski was a prolific writer who produced countless short stories, novels, and poems that have reached beyond their time and place to speak to generations of readers all over the world. Many of his poems remain little known since they appeared in small magazines but were never collected, and a large number of them have yet to be published. In Storm for the Living and the Dead, Abel Debritto has curated a collection of rare and never- before-seen materialpoems from obscure, hard-to-find magazines, as well as from libraries and private collections all over the country. In doing so, Debritto has captured the essence of Bukowskis inimitable poetic styletough and hilarious but ringing with humanity. Storm for the Living and the Dead is a gift for any devotee of the Dirty Old Man of American letters.
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( With Bukowski, the votes are still coming in. There see...)
With Bukowski, the votes are still coming in. There seems to be no middle ground?people seem either to love him or hate him. Tales of his own life and doings are as wild and weird as the very stories he writes. In a sense, Bukowski was a legend in his time . . . a madman, a recluse, a lover . . . tender, vicious . . . never the same . . . these are exceptional stories that come pounding out of his violent and depraved life . . . horrible and holy, you cannot read them and ever come away the same again. Bukowski . . . "a professional disturber of the peace . . . laureate of Los Angeles netherworld writes with crazy romantic insistence that losers are less phony than winners, and with an angry compassion for the lost." ?Jack Kroll, Newsweek "Bukowskis poems are extraordinarily vivid and often bitterly funny observations of people living on the very edge of oblivion. His poetry, in all its glorious simplicity, was accessible the way poetry seldom is ? a testament to his genius." ?Nick Burton, PIF Magazine Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. His first book of poetry was published in 1959; he went on to publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including books published by City Lights Publishers such as Notes of a Dirty Old Man, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man, The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, Tales of Ordinary Madness, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, The Bell Tolls for No One,and Absence of the Hero.
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( A raw and tenderly funny look at the human-cat relation...)
A raw and tenderly funny look at the human-cat relationship, from one of our most treasured and transgressive writers. The cat is the beautiful devil. Felines touched a vulnerable spot in Charles Bukowskis crusty soul. For the writer, there was something majestic and elemental about these inscrutable creatures he admired, sentient beings whose searing gaze could penetrate deep into our being. Bukowski considered cats to be unique forces of nature, elusive emissaries of beauty and love. On Cats offers Bukowskis musings on these beloved animals and their toughness and resiliency. He honors them as fighters, hunters, survivors who command awe and respect as they grip tightly onto the world around them: A cat is only ITSELF, representative of the strong forces of life that wont let go. Funny, moving, tough, and caring, On Cats brings together the acclaimed writers reflections on these animals he so admired. Bukowskis cats are fierce and demandinghe captures them stalking their prey; crawling across his typewritten pages; waking him up with claws across the face. But they are also affectionate and giving, sources of inspiration and gentle, insistent care. Poignant yet free of treacle, On Cats is an illuminating portrait of this one-of-a-kind artist and his unique view of the world, witnessed through his relationship with the animals he considered his most profound teachers.
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( Poems deal with writing, death and immortality, literat...)
Poems deal with writing, death and immortality, literature, city life, illness, war, and the past.
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( This second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski...)
This second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski takes readers deep into the raw, wild vein of writing that extends from the early 70s to the 1990s.
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( To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski wasand remain...)
To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski wasand remainsthe quintessential counterculture icon. A hard-drinking wild man of literature and a stubborn outsider to the poetry world, he wrote unflinchingly about booze, work, and women, in raw, street-tough poems whose truth has struck a chord with generations of readers. Edited by John Martin, the legendary publisher of Black Sparrow Press and a close friend of Bukowski's, The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best works from Bukowski's long poetic career, including the last of his never-before-collected poems. Celebrating the full range of the poet's extra-ordinary and surprising sensibility, and his uncompromising linguistic brilliance, these poems cover a rich lifetime of experiences and speak to Bukowski's "immense intelligence, the caring heart that saw through the sham of our pretenses and had pity on our human condition" (The New York Quarterly). The Pleasures of the Damned is an astonishing poetic treasure trove, essential reading for both longtime fans and those just discovering this unique and legendary American voice.
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( Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame is poetry full of g...)
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame is poetry full of gambling, drinking and women. Charles Bukowski writes realistically about the seedy underbelly of life.
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( How-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinask...)
How-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova. With all of Bukowski's trademark humor and gritty, dark honesty, this 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum is an uncompromising account of life on the edge.
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( In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels...)
In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, woman, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D.H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.
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columnist novelist writer poet
Born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany. Bukowski was brought to the United States at the age of two in 1922 with his father, an American soldier, and his German mother. As an adolescent he was distanced from his peers by a disfiguring case of acne and he resisted the attempts of his abusive and uncompromising father to instill in him the American ideals of hard work and patriotism. His father believed in firm discipline and often beat Bukowski for the smallest offenses.
Following high school, Bukowski attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941 but left without obtaining a degree.
He began writing hundreds of unsuccessful short stories while drifting from city to city in a succession of low-paying jobs-including work as a mailman, post office clerk, Red Cross orderly, and laborer in a slaughterhouse and a dog biscuit factory. Although he published his first short story, "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip, " in a 1944 issue of Story magazine at the age of twenty-four, Bukowski virtually stopped writing for a decade, choosing instead to live as an alcoholic on skid row. After being hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer in 1955, Bukowski began writing poetry and resolved to drink less heavily. During this period he discovered the literature of Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, and especially Ernest Hemingway, which offered him an alternative to alcoholism and aided in the development of his own concise, realistic prose style. Bukowski published his first collection of poetry, Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail, in 1960. He quickly produced a series of poetry chapbooks, including Longshot Poemsfor Broke Players and Run with the Hunted, featuring surreal verse that expresses sentimentality for the West's Romantic past as well as disgust for the vacuousness of modern culture. While these poems garnered him a small but loyal following over the next decade, Bukowski's work in the short story genre first gained him a wide readership and established his literary reputation. Beginning in 1967, when the antiwar and counterculture movements flourished in the United States, Bukowski began contributing a weekly column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man, " to the Los Angeles alternative newspaper Open City, and later, to the Los Angeles Free Press. Bukowski began his career writing poetry critical of American bourgeois institutions while disclaiming the title of writer: "To say I'm a poet puts me in the company of versifiers, neontasters, fools, clods, and skoundrels masquerading as wise men. " In Longshot Poems for Broke Players, Bukowski introduces his characteristic outsider protagonist: the unstudied, self-exiled poet who provokes publicenmity through his apparent rudeness to writers and other socialites, and maintains his freedom and uniqueness as a writer by rejecting the public literary world. In "Letter from the North, " for example, the narrator responds to a despondent writer's request for sympathy with the question: "write you? about what my friend? / I'm only interested in poetry. " In ensuing collections such as It Catches My Heart in Its Hands and Crucifix in a Deathhand, Bukowski's narrator retains his hostility to the outer world while revealing a paradoxical inner gentleness. In "Fuzz, " the unsteady protagonist unexpectedly empathizes with a group of children who are taunting him: "when I go into the liquor store / they whirl around outside / like bees / shut out from their nest. / I buy a fifth of cheap / whiskey / and / 3 / candy bars. " Much of Bukowski's subsequent poetry, collected in such volumes as Poems Written before Jumping out of an 8-story Window, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills, and Fire Station, deals in concrete, realistic terms with acts of rape, sodomy, deceit, and violence, particularly focusing on sexual relationships characterized by physical and emotional abuse in which women seek to enslave men through marriage and men attempt to avoid such enslavement through the equally imprisoning pursuit of wealth and material pleasures. Many of the events described in Bukowski's poetry recur in the autobiographical short stories and novels he began writing in the 1970. While his earlier stories, many of which were published in men's pornographic magazines, generally employ stock formulas, Bukowski's later fiction, published in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness and South of No North: Stories of the Buried Life, is more sophisticated, philosophical, and pointedly critical of American society. Many of these stories focus on sexual relationships that feminist and other critics have faulted as misogynistic. Other critics, however, believe these works expose the short-sightedness, pettiness, and spiritual bankruptcy of a dysfunctional society. During the 19706 Bukowski began writing semiautobiographical novels featuring the first-person narrator Henry ("Hank") Chinaski, a hard-boiled, alcoholic survivor who trades a mediocre, normal life for a position that allows for unromanticized self-awareness in the socially unrestricted environment of the ghetto. Bukowski's first novel, Post Office, contrasts the mindlessness and monotony of Chinaski's work life as an employee of the United States Post Office with the varying degradation and vitality of his unconventional personal life. Factotum chronicles Chinaski's experiences as a young man before the events related in Post Office, while Ham on Rye recounts his adolescent years and conflicts with his tyrannical father. Women details Chinaski's sexual exploits after the events chronicled in Post Office and his eventual desire for a monogamous relationship. Chinaski is also a central character in Bukowski's novel Barfly, which he adapted into a screenplay for the film directed by Barbet Schroeder and starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. Bukowski's encounters with California's film industry are also detailed in Hollywood, another novel featuring Chinaski. Bukowski died of leukemia in Los Angeles in 1994. In 1939, Bukowski began attending Los Angeles City College, dropping out at the beginning of World War II and moving to New York to become a writer. The next few years were spent writing and traveling and collecting a pile of rejection slips. By 1946 Bukowski had decided to give up his writing aspirations, and what followed was a binge that took him all over the world and lasted for approximately ten years. Ending up near death, Bukowski's life changed and he started writing again. "If a writer must sample life at its most elemental, then surely Bukowski qualifies as a laureate of poetic preparedness, " observes Bob Graalman in the Dictionary of Literary Biography; Bukowski's many jobs over the years have included stock boy, dishwasher, postal clerk, and factory worker. He did not begin his professional writing career until the age of thirty-five, and like other contemporaries, Bukowski began by publishing in underground newspapers, especially his local papers Open City and the L. A. Free Press. Since his first book of poetry was published in 1959, Bukowski has written over forty others. Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, Bukowski's first book of poetry, covers the major interests and themes that occupy many of his works, the most important being "the sense of a desolate, abandoned world, " as R. R. Cuscaden points out in the Outsider. In addition to this sense of desolation, Bukowski also fills his free verse with all the absurdities of life, especially in relation to death. It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, published in 1963, collects poetry written by Bukowski between the years of 1955 and 1963. "Bukowski's more recent poetry, such as Dangling in the Tournefortia, published in 1982, continues along the same vein as his first collection. "Low-life bard of Los Angeles, Mr. Bukowski has nothing new for us here, " observes Peter Schjeldahl in the New York Times Book Review, "simply more and still more accounts in free verse of his follies with alcohol and women and of fellow losers hitting bottom and somehow discovering new ways to continue falling. " Ham on Rye, published in 1982, also features Henry Chinaski as its protagonist. Bukowski travels into new territory with this novel, describing his/Chinaski's childhood and adolescent years. The first part of the book is dominated by Chinaski's brutal and domineering father, focusing more on Henry as he moves into his lonely and isolated adolescent years. Following high school, Chinaski holds a job and attends college for a short period of time before beginning his "real" life of cheap hotels, sleazy bars, and the track. It is also at this time that Henry starts to send stories to magazines and accumulate a number of rejection slips. Continuing the examination of his younger years, Bukowski wrote the screenplay for the movie Barfly, which was released in 1987, starring Mickey Rourke. The movie focuses on three days in the life of Bukowski at the age of twenty-four. Bukowski's experiences with the making of Barfly became the basis of his 1989 novel Hollywood. The writer was seriously ill since 1988. The immune system was practically destroyed, at first Bukowski was diagnosed pneumonia, moving back to the hospital for treatment, where the writer was diagnosed with leukemia. At 11:55, on March 9, 1994, at the age of 73, Charles Bukowski died.
( A timeless selection of some of Charles Bukowskis best...)
( Edited by Abel Debritto, the definitive collection of p...)
( In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels...)
( One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deli...)
( This second posthumous collection from Charles Bukowski...)
( Charles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You...)
( A raw and tenderly funny look at the human-cat relation...)
( First published in 1977, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a c...)
( Poems deal with writing, death and immortality, literat...)
( To his legions of fans, Charles Bukowski wasand remain...)
( Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame is poetry full of g...)
( How-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinask...)
( With Bukowski, the votes are still coming in. There see...)
( "It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski ...)
Quotations:
"Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul. "
"Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?"
"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence. "
"The more cats you have, the longer you live. If you have a hundred cats, you'll live ten times longer than if you have ten. Someday this will be discovered, and people will have a thousand cats and live forever. "
"Do you hate people? I don't hate them. .. I just feel better when they're not around. "
"I've never been lonely. I've been in a room. .. I've felt suicidal, I've been depressed. I've felt awful . .. awful beyond all , but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me. .. or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude. .. "
"The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves. "
"Are people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn't have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain, you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink's office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one. "
"People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice. "
"I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta. No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there. "
"If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life. "
"You know the typical crowd, Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have. "
"I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me, and I will remember your small room the feel of you the light in the window your records your books our morning coffee our noons our nights our bodies spilled together sleeping the tiny flowing currents immediate and forever your leg my leg your arm my arm your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again. "
Combining journalism, fiction, and philosophy in a rambling, disjointed style, his pieces established his philosophy and defiant, anarchic persona. Perceiving American culture as hypocritical, Bukowski censured American films and television as escapist wish-fulfillment, morality as organized hypocrisy, patriotism as conformism, and academic writers, scholars, and intellectuals as self-righteous charlatans who attack American society while reaping its benefits. Charles Bukowski was a prolific underground writer who depicted the depraved metropolitan environments of the down-trodden members of American society in his poetry and prose. A cult hero, Bukowski relied on experience, emotion, and imagination in his works, often using direct language and violent and sexual imagery. While some critics find his style offensive, others claim that Bukowski is satirizing the machismo attitude through his routine use of sex, alcohol abuse, and violence. A slight child, Bukowski was also bullied by boys his own age, and was frequently rejected by girls because of his bad complexion. "When Bukowski was 13, " writes Ciotti, "one of [his friends] invited him to his father's wine cellar and served him his first drink of alcohol. 'It was magic, ' Bukowski would later write. 'Why hadn't someone told me?'"
Many of his fans regard him as one of the best of the Meat School poets, who are known for their tough and direct masculine writing. The protagonists in the stories in Hot Water Music, published in 1983, live in cheap hotels and are often struggling underground writers, similar to Bukowski himself. Bukowski's main autobiographical figure is Henry Chinaski, who appears in a few of these stories and in many of his novels. Among the semi-autobiographical stories in this collection are two which deal with events following the funeral of Bukowski's father. The other stories deal with numerous violent acts, including a jealous wife shooting her husband over an old infidelity, a drunk bank manager molesting young children, a former stripper mutilating the man she is seducing, and a young man who gets over his impotence by raping a neighbor in his apartment elevator. Bukowski continues his examination of "broken people" in such novels as Post Office and Ham on Rye. In Post Office, Henry Chinaski is very similar to ex-postman Bukowski; he is a remorseless drunk and womanizer who spends a lot of time at the race track. Chinaski also has to deal with his monotonous and strenuous job, as well as a number of harassing supervisors. Eventually marrying a rich nymphomaniac from Texas, Chinaski is inevitably dumped for another man and finds himself back at the post office. "Bukowski's loser's string of anecdotes, convulsively funny and also sad, is unflagging entertainment but in the end doesn't add up to more than the sum of its parts, somehow missing the novelist's alchemy, " asserts a Times Literary Supplement contributor. But Valentine Cunningham, also writing in the Times Literary Supplement, sees the novel as a success: "Pressed in by Post Office bureaucrats, their mean-minded regulations and their heaps of paperwork, the misfit [Chinaski] looks frequently like an angel of light.
Quotes from others about the person
"Without trying to make himself look good, much less heroic, Bukowski writes with a nothing-to-lose truthfulness which sets him apart from most other 'autobiographical' novelists and poets, " pointed out Stephen Kessler in the San Francisco Review of Books, adding: "Firmly in the American tradition of the maverick, Bukowski writes with no apologies from the frayed edge of society, beyond or beneath respectability, revealing nasty and alarming under views. "
Michael Lally, writing in Village Voice, maintains that "Bukowski is . .. a phenomenon. He has established himself as a writer with a consistent and insistent style based on what he projects as his 'personality, ' the result of hard, intense living. " Bukowski has "a sandblasted face, warts on his eyelids and a dominating nose that looks as if it were assembled in a junkyard from Studebaker hoods and Buick fenders, " describes Paul Ciotti in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. "Yet his voice is so soft and bemused that it's hard to take him seriously when he says: 'I don't like people. I don't even like myself. There must be something wrong with me. '"
"It is tempting to make correlations between [Bukowski's] emergence in Los Angeles literary circles and the arrival of the 19606, when poets were still shaking hands with Allen Ginsberg and other poets of his generation while younger activist poets tapped on their shoulders, begging for an introduction, " explains Graalman. "Bukowski cultivated his obvious link to both eras-the blackness and despair of the 1950 with the rebellious cry of the 1960 for freedom. " "Published by small, underground presses and ephemeral mimeographed little magazines, " describes Jay Dougherty in Contemporary Novelists, "Bukowski has gained popularity, in a sense, through word of mouth. "
"The main character in his poems and short stories, which are largely autobiographical, is usually a down-and-out writer [Henry Chinaski] who spends his time working at marginal jobs (and getting fired from them), getting drunk and making love with a succession of bimbos and floozies, " relates Ciotti. "Otherwise, he hangs out with fellow losers-whores, pimps, alcoholics, drifters, the people who lose their rent money at the race track, leave notes of goodby on dressers and have flat tires on the freeway at 3 a. m. "
Ciotti maintains: "Right from the beginning, Bukowski knew that if a poet wants to be read, he has to be noticed first. 'So, ' he once said, 'I got my act up. I wrote vile (but interesting) stuff that made people hate me, that made them curious about this Bukowski. I threw bodies off my porch into the night. I sneered at hippies. I was in and out of drunk tanks. A lady accused me of rape. '" "Bukowski's world, scored and grooved by the impersonal instruments of civilized industrial society, by 20th-century knowledge and experience, remains essentially a world in which meditation and analysis have little part, " asserts John William Corrington in Northwest Review. The poems touch on topics that are familiar to Bukowski, such as rerolling cigarette butts, the horse that came in, a hundred-dollar call girl, and a rumpled hitchhiker on his way to nowhere. It Catches My Heart in Its Hands contains poems which "are energetic, tough, and unnerving, " relates Dabney Stuart in Poetry. And Kenneth Rexroth asserts in the New York Times Book Review that Bukowski "belongs in the small company of poets of real, not literary, alienation. "Bukowski writes well, with ear-pleasing cadences, wit and perfect clarity, which are all the more beguiling for issuing from a stumblebum persona. His grace with words gives a comic gleam to even his meanest revelations. " William Logan, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, concludes: "Life here has almost entirely mastered art. " Similar to his poetry in subject matter, Bukowski's short stories also deal with sex, violence, and the absurdities of life. In his first collection of short stories, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, later abridged and published as Life and Death in the Charity Ward, Bukowski "writes as an unregenerate lowbrow contemptuous of our claims to superior being, " describes Thomas R. Edwards in the New York Review of Books. On the other hand, Peter Ackroyd maintains in the Spectator, "A dull character finally emerges, and it is a dullness which spreads through these stories like a stain. " Erling Friis-Baastad, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, concludes, "In his best work, Bukowski comes close to making us comprehend, if not the sense of it all, then at least its intensity. He cannot forget, and he will not let us forget, that every morning at 3 a. m. broken people lie 'in their beds, trying in vain to sleep, and deserving that rest, if they could find it. '" "Particularly striking is Bukowski's uncharacteristic restraint: the prose is hard and exact, the writer's impulse towards egocentricity repressed, " comments David Montrose in the Times Literary Supplement.
Charles Bukowski was three times married. The first time he married at the age of twenty-seven in 1947 on Jane Cooney Baker. Baker was ten years older than her husband, by the time of their meeting, she was suffering from alcoholism, which brought her closer to Bukowski. The couple fought a lot and diverged several times, they divorced eight years later. In the same year (1955), the writer married for the second time on Barbara Fry, the editor of a small literary magazine. With Bukowski, they met through letters: Fry enthusiastically accepted the work of the poet and wanted to see him, after which they immediately began a romantic relationship. The marriage with Fry lasted until 1958. Five years later, Bukowski got acquainted with Francis Smith, a fan of his work, with whom he corresponded for a long time, until in 1963 they finally met. From Smith, the writer will have a daughter, Marina Louisa Bukowski; Soon, however, they will disperse, never combining a legitimate marriage. With his last wife, Linda Lee Begley, the writer got acquainted in the process of writing the novel "Women", accidentally stopping at the Begley-owned snack bar. Before the wedding, their romance lasted about seven years; in 1985 they were married.
