Gunslinger

Edward Dorn (1929–1999) was one of the original voices of his generation. Often associated with the Black Mountain poets, Dorn was the author of more than forty books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

“[Gunslinger] is altogether a brilliant and strange performance, with no true parallels in American poetry, at least up until then. . . . If it's not the major 20th-century long poem a number of serious critics claim it to be . . . it's the work of a brilliant, wildly original, very funny poet firing on all cylinders.” - August Kleinzahler (New York Times Book Review) “There is nothing else like it in poetry.” (Publishers Weekly) “Gunslinger is perhaps the strangest long poem of the last half-century: a quest myth wrapped around an acid-inspired western comic strip adventure in which a gunslinger, astride a drug-taking, talking horse called Levi-Strauss, searches for Howard Hughes.” - Patrick McGuinness (The Guardian) “An essential piece of American literature, already, and the further we descend into an age of circuses without bread, the more poignant will be our Slinger’s aim on the true heart of the West.” - Matthew Sirois (New York Journal of Books) “A dramatic poem of the first order for our day.” - Andrew Hoyem (Poetry) "If poetry is news that stays news, Gunslinger tells you what the news feels like when language has lost all grip on reality, 'like trying to read a newspaper/from nothing but the ink poured into your ear.' If poetry tends to find its own moment, then Dorn may finally be due his." - Andre Naffis-Sahely (Poetry)

• Foreword. On the Fiftieth Anniversary of Ed Dorn's Gunslinger / Marjorie Perloff  viiiIntroduction / Marjorie Perloff  xiiiGunslinger / Edward DornBook I  1Book II  43The Cycle  87Book III 111Book IIII  143To Eliminate the Draw: Edward Dorn's Gunslinger / Michael Davidson  203A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn / Charles Olson