Black Sparrow Press – serie

BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER • LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER • BOSTON.COM BOOKCLUB SELECTIONA celebration and meditation on the season for drinking hot chocolate, spotting a wreath on a neighbor’s door, experiencing the change in light of shorter days. All aspects of Winter, from the meteorological to the mythological, are captured in this masterful essay, told in wise and luminous prose that pushes back the dark.Winter begins with the shortest day of the year before nightfall. As in her companion volume, Summer Solstice, the author meditates on both the dark and the light and what this season means in our lives.“Winter tells us,” Nina MacLaughlin says, “more than petaled spring, or hot-grassed summer, or fall with its yellow leaves, that we are mortal. In the frankness of its cold, in the mystery of its deep-blue dark, the place in us that knows of death is tickled, focused, stoked. The angels sing on the doorknobs and others sing from the abyss. The sun has been in retreat since June, and the heat inside glows brighter in proportion to its absence. We make up for the lost light in the spark that burns inside us.” If Winter is a time you love for its memories and traditions, if you love writing that takes your breath away with lyrical leaps across time and space, Winter Solstice is an unforgettable book you’ll cherish.

“No one mulling this gentle record will fail to be moved.”—San Francisco ChroniclePoet, publisher, bookseller, activist—this is the story of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the bookshop he made a landmark in San Francisco, and a life beautifully lived with writers and books.In the mid-1950s a group of San Francisco-based writers emerged as a central force in American letters. Self-styled bohemians, disillusioned with the old American dream of prosperity and conformity, they harangued these “virtues” in their writings. They became known as the Beat Generation. Their ranks included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso. But the unifying force among them was an unassuming, almost painfully shy young poet named Lawrence Ferlinghetti.As owner of the now legendary City Lights Booksellers and its publishing enterprises, City Lights Publishers and its Pocket Poet Series, Ferlinghetti promoted the writings of his rebellious contemporaries, and continually looked for new talent to publish, while conducting a parallel though more personal search for self-identity through his own work. Although that search began with a lonely, unstable childhood in which he never knew his real parents, it would not become manifest until years later with the 1958 publication of his first collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind—that debut would go on to sell more than one million copies and become one of the bestselling and most popular books of poetry ever published.In this, the first biography of Ferlinghetti ever published (originally released in 1979), Neeli Cherkovski recreates those early years of the poet-publisher and examines the content and import of his work. Long out-of-print, this is a crucial literary document by a man who knew the legendary poet-publisher-bookseller intimately.This expanded edition—published just one year after Ferlinghetti’s passing in 2021 at the age of 101—includes a fascinating, hilarious new foreword about how the book came to be written in the late 1970s, an epilogue covering the last forty years of Ferlinghetti’s life, and a personal, tender afterword about the long relationship between the author and his subject.For readers interested in American culture and how a business can make social change, this is an irresistible story of a long life very well lived.

Carl Rakosi probes the minutiae of everyday experience, expressing, as one reviewer has put it, an attentiveness “to the ordinary until the ordinary ceases to be so. . .” But, in this collection, the poetic voice now addresses itself with greater frequency to public issues.

Two great poets thinking through life and literature in an unequalled correspondence: Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence: Volume 2.The ten-volume Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence is an enormously valuable, often thrilling, record of the friendship between two major poets, their greatest work largely still ahead of them both. Working out their thoughts in letters, Olson credited Creeley with formulating one of the basic principles of a new poetry: the idea that “form is never more than an extension of content.” But there was also the larger issue of how a man of language must live in the world.The correspondence covers periods when both men were unsettled—Creeley restlessly moving his young family around isolated Mediterranean villages, Olson drifting indecisively between conflicting roles as mentor at Black Mountain and writer in Washington, D.C. Throughout, however, there is an intense, single-minded dedication to poetry and the unique difficulties of putting into language the creative rhythms of conscious thought. This collection of uncommon richness will charm, challenge and inspire.

Two great poets thinking through life and literature in an unequalled correspondence: Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence: Volume 3.The ten-volume Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence is an enormously valuable, often thrilling, record of the friendship between two major poets, their greatest work largely still ahead of them both. Working out their thoughts in letters, Olson credited Creeley with formulating one of the basic principles of a new poetry: the idea that “form is never more than an extension of content.” But there was also the larger issue of how a man of language must live in the world.The correspondence covers periods when both men were unsettled—Creeley restlessly moving his young family around isolated Mediterranean villages, Olson drifting indecisively between conflicting roles as mentor at Black Mountain and writer in Washington, D.C. Throughout, however, there is an intense, single-minded dedication to poetry and the unique difficulties of putting into language the creative rhythms of conscious thought. This collection of uncommon richness will charm, challenge and inspire.

“Wanda Coleman is best known for what has often been termed her ‘warrior voice’ … Coleman’s poet’s voice too can weep elegiac, summoning memories of her childhood’s neighborhoods – her South LA’s wild-frond palms, the smog smear of pre-ecology consciousness.”—Los Angeles TimesIn Imagoes, Wanda Coleman blends memory with the reality of her present through an idiom that oscillates seamlessly between natural imagery and the urban edifice of Los Angeles. Booklist called it: “Hard, brilliant strokes shot through with street music.”

Two great poets thinking through life and literature in an unequalled correspondence: Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence: Volume 5.The ten-volume Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence is an enormously valuable, often thrilling, record of the friendship between two major poets, their greatest work largely still ahead of them both. Working out their thoughts in letters, Olson credited Creeley with formulating one of the basic principles of a new poetry: the idea that “form is never more than an extension of content.” But there was also the larger issue of how a man of language must live in the world.The correspondence covers periods when both men were unsettled—Creeley restlessly moving his young family around isolated Mediterranean villages, Olson drifting indecisively between conflicting roles as mentor at Black Mountain and writer in Washington, D.C. Throughout, however, there is an intense, single-minded dedication to poetry and the unique difficulties of putting into language the creative rhythms of conscious thought. This collection of uncommon richness will charm, challenge and inspire.

Two great poets thinking through life and literature in an unequalled correspondence: Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence: Volume 8.The ten-volume Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence is an enormously valuable, often thrilling, record of the friendship between two major poets, their greatest work largely still ahead of them both. Working out their thoughts in letters, Olson credited Creeley with formulating one of the basic principles of a new poetry: the idea that “form is never more than an extension of content.” But there was also the larger issue of how a man of language must live in the world.The correspondence covers periods when both men were unsettled—Creeley restlessly moving his young family around isolated Mediterranean villages, Olson drifting indecisively between conflicting roles as mentor at Black Mountain and writer in Washington, D.C. Throughout, however, there is an intense, single-minded dedication to poetry and the unique difficulties of putting into language the creative rhythms of conscious thought. This collection of uncommon richness will charm, challenge and inspire.

Two great poets thinking through life and literature in an unequalled correspondence: Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence: Volume 9.The ten-volume Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence is an enormously valuable, often thrilling, record of the friendship between two major poets, their greatest work largely still ahead of them both. Working out their thoughts in letters, Olson credited Creeley with formulating one of the basic principles of a new poetry: the idea that “form is never more than an extension of content.” But there was also the larger issue of how a man of language must live in the world.The correspondence covers periods when both men were unsettled—Creeley restlessly moving his young family around isolated Mediterranean villages, Olson drifting indecisively between conflicting roles as mentor at Black Mountain and writer in Washington, D.C. Throughout, however, there is an intense, single-minded dedication to poetry and the unique difficulties of putting into language the creative rhythms of conscious thought. This collection of uncommon richness will charm, challenge and inspire.

“Birds, Beasts, and Flowers! is the peak of Lawrence’s achievement as a poet….The lucidity of his language matches the intensity of his vision; he can make the reader see what he is saying as very few writers can.”—W. H. AudenD. H. Lawrence made his first great experiment in free verse in this collection of poems about animals and the natural world, published when he was thirty-eight. This Black Sparrow edition re-sets the text in the format of the first edition (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923) and restores several “indecent” lines suppressed by the original publisher. Lawrence’s original jacket artwork is reproduced on the jacket in full color.In the words of the Academy of American Poets, “Lawrence believed in writing poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Many of his best-loved poems treat the physical and inner life of plants and animals; others are bitterly satiric and express his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon Society.”

Two for the Roadbrings together a pair of thematically related novels, Man and Boy (1951) and In Orbit (1967), each of which concerns a rural American community’s response to petty tyranny.

In this collection of articles, essays, interviews and columns, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles' noted satirist, poet, and journalist, recounts three decades of the growth of her city and herself. Originally written for the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Free Press and other publications, Ms. Coleman called these pieces “a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory.”We find the author laboring as waitress, bartender, editor of a sleazy men's magazine--caught up in militant revolutionary politics and witnessing even more violent social upheaval in the form of the Watts and Rodney King riots. As Publisher's Weekly noted, “Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable.”

the only place I said what I meantwas in poems—from “The No More Apologizing, the No More Little Laughing Blues”Lyn Lifshin is a poet who speaks with directness—immediate and accessible, seemingly artlessly, yet conveying complex truths. This collection is like an unforgettable late night, sitting on a porch in the sweet night air and listening to stories told by a very close friend.

Angry, wistful, defiant and funny re-inventions of historical and biographical worlds, this poetic history offers a mix of chronicle, anecdote, document, reportage, paean and polemic.

In its day, Andrei Codrescu's controversial and notorious anti-literary literary magazine Exquisite Corpse was a primary source rebellion, passion and black humor. Calculated to assault, shock, intrigue and reflect our anxious millennium fill the pages of this Corpse reader. A heady invitation to enjoy one's intellectual freedom while it lasts, the volume inscribes central (and edgy) poetic controversies, eulogizes and condemns, realizes and surrealizes, translates and travels across space and time to place us in all those wild worlds visited by the bizarre legion of Corpse correspondents.

In its day, Andrei Codrescu's controversial and notorious anti-literary literary magazine Exquisite Corpse was a primary source rebellion, passion and black humor. Calculated to assault, shock, intrigue and reflect our anxious millennium fill the pages of this Corpse reader. A heady invitation to enjoy one's intellectual freedom while it lasts, the volume inscribes central (and edgy) poetic controversies, eulogizes and condemns, realizes and surrealizes, translates and travels across space and time to place us in all those wild worlds visited by the bizarre legion of Corpse correspondents.