The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps

Charles Bukowski. Ecco, $17 (360pp) ISBN 978-1-57423-165-6

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) remains as prolific and belligerent in death as he did in life. In classic Bukowski fashion, the pieces in The Night Torn with Footsteps: New Poems deploy the line-as-phrase as a primary formal constraint, and a hackneyed, boastful misogyny as a major rhetorical gesture. If continually found ""sitting/ in my cheesebox room/ closer to suicide than/ salvation,"" readers will still be right there with Buk. ( Dec. 11)

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