Poems of disarming honesty and sharp humor, written with spontaneous passion and touching straightforwardness. Charles Bukowski writes about love, lust, and desire in the first person, sometimes with harshness and cynicism, other times with sensitivity and tenderness, thus outlining the multiple versions of the enamored individual.

His poems, whether amusing or not, often playful, speak of the allure of the mysterious and sex, the rejection or acceptance by the object of desire, the egoism and narcissism of the enamored subject, and ultimately, the redemptive power of love.

Revealing poems about the man and the writer Bukowski – referring to his lovers and friends, as well as to his daughter and his work – who, with his painfully intimate, contemplative manner, elevates love to a prism through which he views the world in all its beauty and brutality, as well as his own vulnerable position within it.

I pass by the hotel at 8 and at 5; in the alleys, there are cats and bottles and vagrants, and I look up at the window and think, I don’t know where you are anymore, and I continue my way and wonder where life goes when it stops.