He has a gift for helping you hear what needs to be said… His high points are the poems that you wish you could listen to in a car, on a long coastal highway with the windows rolled down.

Jeff Gordinier, New York Times

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

sA prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues, Ferlinghetti’s poetry counters an elitist conception of art and the artist’s role in the world. Although his poetry is often concerned with everyday life and civic themes, it is never simply personal or polemical, and it stands on his grounding in tradition and universal reach.

Ferlinghetti was born in Bronxville, New York on March 24, 1919, son of Carlo Ferlinghetti, an immigrant from Brescia, Italy, and Clemence Mendes-Monsanto. Following his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he took a degree in journalism, he served in the U.S. Navy in World War II. He was a commander of three different submarine chasers in the Atlantic and saw action at the Normandy invasion. Later in the war, he was assigned to the attack transport USS Selinur in the Pacific. In 1945, just after the atomic bomb obliterated Nagasaki, he witnessed firsthand the horrific ruins of the city. This experience was the origin of his lifelong antiwar stance.

Ferlinghetti received a Master’s degree in English Literature from Columbia University in 1947 and a Doctorate de l’Université de Paris (Sorbonne) in 1950. From 1951 to 1953, after he settled in San Francisco, he taught French in an adult education program, painted, and wrote art criticism. In 1953, with Peter D. Martin, he founded City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperback bookshop in the country. For over sixty years the bookstore has served as a “literary meeting place” for writers, readers, artists, and intellectuals to explore books and ideas.

In 1955, Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishers with the Pocket Poets Series, extending his concept of a cultural meeting place to a larger arena. His aim was to present fresh and accessible poetry from around the world in order to create “an international, dissident ferment.” The series began in 1955 with his own Pictures of the Gone World; translations by Kenneth Rexroth and poetry by Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov were soon added to the list.

Copies of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems were seized by authorities in 1956 and Ferlinghetti was arrested and charged with selling obscene material. He defended Howl in court, a case that drew national attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat Generation writers, many of whom he later published. (With a fine defense by the ACLU and the support of prestigious literary and academic figures, he was acquitted.) This landmark First Amendment case established a legal precedent for the publication of controversial work with redeeming social importance.

In the 1960s, Ferlinghetti plunged into a life of frequent travel––giving poetry readings, taking part in festivals, happenings, and literary/political conferences in Chile, Cuba, Germany, the USSR, Holland, Fiji, Australia, Nicaragua, Spain, Greece, and the Czech Republic––as well as in Mexico, Italy, and France, where he spent substantial periods of time. A resolute progressive, he spoke out on such crucial political issues as the Cuban revolution, the nuclear arms race, farm-worker organizing, the Vietnam War, the Sandanista and Zapatista struggles, and the wars in the Middle East.

Ferlinghetti’s paintings have been shown at a number of exhibitions and galleries in the U.S. and abroad. In the 1990s he was associated with the international Fluxus movement through the Archivio Francesco Conz in Verona. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including a 2010 retrospective at the Museo di Roma in Trastevere, Italy, and a group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2016. His works are in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Arts and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, and most recently exhibited at a one-man show at San Francisco’s Rena Bransten Gallery in July 2016.

He was named San Francisco’s Poet Laureate in August 1998. He has been the recipient of numerous awards: the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Award, the BABRA Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award, the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, and the Authors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2003, he was was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2005 the National Book Foundation gave him the inaugural Literarian Award for outstanding service to the American literary community. In 2007 he was named Commandeur, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In Italy, his poetry has been awarded the Premio Taormino, the Premio Camaiore, the Premio Flaiano, and the Premio Cavour.

Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind(1958) continues to be one of the most popular poetry books in the U.S., with over 1,000,000 copies in print. A prolific author, Ferlinghetti has over a dozen books currently in print, and his work has been translated into many languages. Among his poetry books are These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993(1993), _A Far Rockaway of the Heart _(1997), How to Paint Sunlight(2001), Americus Book I(2004),Poetry as Insurgent Art(2007), _Time of Useful Consciousness _(2012), and Blasts Cries Laughter (2014), all published by New Directions. His two novels are Her(1960) and Love in the Days of Rage (2001). City Lights issued an anthology of San Francisco poems in 2001. He is the translator of Paroles by Jacques Prévert (from French) and Roman Poems by Pier Paolo Passolini (from Italian.) In 2015 Liveright Publishing, a division of W.W. Norton, published his Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals (1960-2010). In 2017, New Directions published an anthology of his work titled Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems, and his latest book is a novel, titled Little Boy (Doubleday, 2019).

cover image of the book Ferlinghetti's Greatest Poems

Ferlinghetti's Greatest Poems

At last, just in time for his 99th birthday, a powerful overview of one of America’s most beloved poets: New Directions is proud to present a swift, terrific chronological selection of Ferlinghetti’s poems, spanning more than six decades of work and presenting one of modern poetry’s greatest achievements.

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cover image of the book Blasts Cries Laughter

Blasts Cries Laughter

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Blasts contains blasts, blessings, and curses in the vortex of today, taking its cues from the original little magazine, Blast (published by Wyndham Lewis with Ezra Pound in 1914–15), which helped create the modernist movement in literature and the visual arts. Ferlinghetti speaks for the poor, the forgotten, the beaten, and the bombed.

And speak to us in the poet’s voice the voice of the people mixed with a wild soft laughter —
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cover image of the book Time of Useful Consciousness: Limited Edition

Time of Useful Consciousness: Limited Edition

New Directions is proud to announce a galvanizing new book by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. At ninety-three, Ferlinghetti shows more power than most any other poet at work today. He describes his new book, Time of Useful Consciousness — his first since Poetry as Insurgent Art — as “a fragmented recording of the American stream-of-consciousness, always westward streaming; a people’s poetic history in the tradition of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Charles Olson’s Maximus, Allen Ginsberg’s Fall of America, and Ed Sanders’s America: A History in Verse. ’Time of Useful Consciousness’ is an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time in which some life-saving action is possible.”

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cover image of the book Time of Useful Consciousness

Time of Useful Consciousness

**A limited edition _Time of Useful Consciousness _is also available. **Details are here. ****

New Directions is proud to announce a galvanizing new book by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. At ninety-three, Ferlinghetti shows more power than most any other poet at work today. He describes his new book, _Time of Useful Consciousness __— _his first since _Poetry as Insurgent Art __— _as “a fragmented recording of the American stream-of-consciousness, always westward streaming; a people’s poetic history in the tradition of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Charles Olson’s Maximus, Allen Ginsberg’s Fall of America, and Ed Sanders’s America: A History in Verse. ’Time of Useful Consciousness’ is an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time in which some life-saving action is possible.”

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cover image of the book Poetry As Insurgent Art

Poetry As Insurgent Art

Since publishing A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been the poetic conscience of America. Now in Poetry as Insurgent Art, he offers a primer, in prose, of what poetry is, could be, and should be. If you read poetry, find out what is missing from the usual fare you are served; if you are a poet, read at your own risk––you will never again look at your role in the same way.

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Americus

Describing Americus as “part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epic—a descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political,” Ferlinghetti combines “universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem, the Gettysburg Address or the Ginsberg Address, that haunt our nocturnal imagination.” This book is a wake-up call that breaks new ground in the grand tradition of Whitman, W.C. Williams, Charles Olson, and Ezra Pound, as Ferlinghetti cruises our literary and political landscapes, past and present, to create an autobiography of American consciousness.

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cover image of the book How To Paint Sunlight

How To Paint Sunlight

How to Paint Sunlight, now being made available in paperbook format, is graced with a short introduction by the poet in which he says, “All I ever wanted to do was paint light on the walls of life.” For more than fifty years Ferlinghetti has been doing just that––illuminating both the everyday and the unusual, all the while keeping true to his original dictum of speaking in a way accessible to everyone. He has been, and remains, “one of our ageless radicals and true bards” (Booklist), and his voice is well known in many places around the world. He was one of the two American poets (the other being John Ashbery) chosen to participate in the second celebration of UNESCO’s World of Poetry Day in Delphi, Greece, where he along with his international confreres each poetically addressed the Oracle. His poem for the occasion is now included in this book.

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Routines

In this collection of thirteen very short plays, Ferlinghetti extends the experiments he began in Unfair Arguments with Existence (1963) into an area barely explored by any dramatist to date––a no man’s land between old-style drama and the spontaneous improvisation of the “happening.’ In between these two extremes, he has created blueprints for dramatic action––outlines from which director and actors may create and interpret freely. There has been much talk lately (in quarterlies such as Studies on the Left) about “revolutionary theatre,” and these “Routines” are a certain step in that direction. In Unfair Arguments with Existence, Ferlinghetti hoped that “feeling around on the frontiers of theatre, we may yet possibly discover some ’seeking action’ in life itself.” In Routines he conceives of theatre as a search for revolutionary solutions, with the audience itself made of good and bad actors “acting out aspirations to some ideal existence.”

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cover image of the book A Coney Island of The Mind (Special Edition)

A Coney Island of The Mind (Special Edition)

Ferlinghetti is a national treasure, and his voice has become part of our collective conscience. Some of his most famous poems from this collection such as “I Am Waiting” and “Junkman’s Obbligato” were created for jazz accompaniment. Written in the conservative post-war 1950s, his poems still resonate, as they will continue to resonate, with a joyful anti-establishment fervor that beats a rhythmic portrait of humanity. Ferlinghetti sings of a world in which “the heart flops over / gasping ’Love’,” “cadillacs fell thru the trees like rain,” and where “we are the same people / only further from home / on freeways fifty lanes wide.” This special 50th Anniversary Edition comes with a newly recorded CD of the author reading the 29 poems of the title section of A Coney Island of the Mind as well as selections from Pictures of the Gone World.

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A Far Rockaway Of The Heart

A Far Rockaway of the Heart is Ferlinghetti’s sequel to Coney Island of the Mind, written forty years afterwards in what the author has called “a poetry seizure” that lasted more than a year. A sequence of one hundred and one poems with recurrent themes, it includes various sections on love, art, music, history, and literature, as well as confrontations with major figures in the avant-garde before the arrival of the Beat generation. This paperbound edition now includes eighteen new poems from Ferlinghetti’s Pictures of the Gone World which he publishes under his City Lights imprint. A self-styled “stand-up tragedian,” Ferlinghetti has been called “the foremost chronicler of our times.” If A Coney Island of the Mind was a generation’s vibrant eye-opener, A Far Rockaway of the Heart is a wake-up call for a new age.

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These Are My Rivers

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “one of our ageless radicals and true bards” (Booklist), has gathered here four decades of poetry in his inimitable everyman’s voice, including more than fifty pages of new work. The tone has deepened over the years, and he may now be seen as a true maestro in his field. Behind the irresistible air of immediacy and spontaneity lies much erudition and an antic imagination intent on subverting “the dominant paradigm.” From his earliest books, including his landmark Coney Island of the Mind, Ferlinghetti has written poetry “in ways that those who see poetry as the province of the few and educated had never imagined. That strength has turned out to be lasting” (Joel Oppenheimer, N. Y. Times Books Review).

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cover image of the book European Poems And Transitions

European Poems And Transitions

These poems on European themes by the author of Her (his Paris novel) and the enduring A Coney Island of the Mind were mostly written during the last seven years and, in the poet’s words, are “transformations and transitions looking westward to America and beyond.” Flowing from France to Italy to the Netherlands, on to Germany, back to France, and finally toward America, they follow Ferlinghetti’s own recent journeying. The poems progress geographically and chronologically with a cohesive development of ideas and themes. In part he plays off T. S. Eliot’s “summarizing the past by theft and allusion” but captures the present as well in fleeting incidents of daily experience, and, in his powerful concluding poem “History of the World: A TV Docu-drama,” envisions a possible nuclear future. It is a view of our time and of where we are in it, seen by an eagle eye, told in Ferlinghetti’s inimitable everyman’s voice.

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cover image of the book Wild Dreams Of A New Beginning

Wild Dreams Of A New Beginning

Wild Dreams of a New Beginning brings together two acclaimed poetry volumes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of our “ageless radicals and true bards” (Booklist). Who Are We Now? (1976), the first half of Wild Dreams, takes a long poetic look at the cultural fallout of a more radical time. This probing of the changes in the American psyche through the 1970s is carried forward in the second part, Landscapes of Living & Dying (1979)––a work originally hailed by Library Journal as “Ferlinghetti’s strongest work since his 1957 A Coney Island of the Mind …. [He] pursues his disheveled muse with the innocent passion of a young beatnik, hiding his authentic erudition behind a comfortable guise of spontaneous composition.”

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cover image of the book Over All The Obscene Boundaries

Over All The Obscene Boundaries

These poems on European themes by the author of Her (his Paris novel) and the enduring A Coney Island of the Mind were mostly written during the last seven years and, in the poet’s words, are “transformations and transitions looking westward to America and beyond.” Flowing from France to Italy to the Netherlands, on to Germany, back to France, and finally toward America, they follow Ferlinghetti’s own recent journeying. The poems progress geographically and chronologically with a cohesive development of ideas and themes. In part he plays off T. S. Eliot’s “summarizing the past by theft and allusion” but captures the present as well in fleeting incidents of daily experience, and, in his powerful concluding poem “History of the World: A TV Docu-drama,” envisions a possible nuclear future. It is a view of our time and of where we are in it, seen by an eagle eye, told in Ferlinghetti’s inimitable everyman’s voice.

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Endless Life: Selected Poems

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is surely (as a reviewer in Booklist phrased it) “one of our ageless radicals and true bards.” He has consistently spoken in poetic terms accessible to every type of reader about our life and time and its issues, not only the political ones but those of the interior life. Behind the immediacy of what Library Journal called his “Dynamic, verbose, alarming, charming, and unsettling” poetry and its irresistible spontaneity lie serious thought and erudition. His motivation has been to be (in his words) “an agent provocateur––subversive, anarchistic, and prophetic.” Endless Life: Selected Poems is the poet’s own choice, the poems that still excite him, from eight previous books of poetry. These start with Pictures of the Gone World (1955), the first book he published under his own City Lights imprint, followed by A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), a literary landmark with almost a million copies in print the world over and the first of Ferlinghetti’s thirteen books brought out by New Directions. Starting from San Francisco (1961), The Secret Meaning of Things (1969), Open Eye, Open Heart (1973), Who Are We Now? (1976), Northwest Ecolog (City Lights, 1978), and Landscapes of Living & Dying (1979) are each generously represented. The final section of the book includes the long title poem, “Endless Life.”

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Landscapes Of Living And Dying

In Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s first “Populist Manifesto,” he called for “a new wide-open poetry/with a new commonsensual public surface’’ which still retains “subjective and/or subversive depth.” In Landscapes of Living & Dying, the poet has himself answered that call. As a result, most of these poems have already appeared on the Op/Ed pages or in the news sections of major metropolitan dailies, and this fact alone makes the book unique among new poetry collections. When the San Francisco Examiner published ’’An Elegy to Dispel Gloom’’ it named Ferlinghetti the ’’poet laureate of San Francisco.’’ Despite such acclaim, he continues to view the American scene with rage and despair, compassion, tenderness, and humor.

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Who Are We Now?

“Do you enjoy your own mind? Maxims and legends of total reality, echoing and re-echoing there?” asks Lawrence Ferlinghetti in discussing this, his seventh book of verse. “If we could only decipher it… Visual beatitudes, landscapes of living and dying flashed upon the dark screen…” The poems in Who Are We Now?, truly “landscapes of living,” are naturally attempts to decipher that reality, ranging eclectically from the populist to the esoteric, from Bob Dylan to Gustav Klimt to the already famous “Populist Manifesto,” which the late jazz critic Ralph Gleason characterized as an “important document of the Seventies.”

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Open Eye, Open Heart

It is poems such as these, among those of other poets roughly associated with the San Francisco school, which Pablo Neruda had in mind when he spoke with Ferlinghetti in Cuba not so long ago of “your wide-open American poetry.” There is a wide-angle vision and a very great range in the different kinds and genres of poems––personal and lyric, satiric and meditative, public and political, spoken and sung––written over the past decade during the poet’s travels in the world and inside himself––a world seen in a semi-dark glass through which light nevertheless keeps breaking. In the political section, Ferlinghetti’s consistent anarchist-pacifist position, in the tradition of Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen, is articulated, showing the poet to be a constant force in the evolution of a radical humanist consciousness.

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cover image of the book Back Roads To Far Places

Back Roads To Far Places

This single long poem of intimately linked verses is not a translation, although the echoes of Japanese poetry and Tibetan Buddhist texts are many. Starting out after Basho but meeting Milarepa and Dante among others en route, the poet finds his own way, toward a kind of American mantra.

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The Mexican Night

The Mexican Night is the first of several travel journals, to be published over the next few years, which Ferlinghetti originally envisioned under the title of “Writing Across the Landscape." It is considerably more than a travel book, including as it does much pure prose-poetry, new poems, and drawings taken from the author’s notebooks. The Mexican Night is not only personal but political, while at times it would seem to be a kind of “travel novel”––with but one character––the wandering figure (somehow surrounded with solitude) of the poet himself.

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The Secret Meaning Of Things

The Secret Meaning of Things is Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s fourth book of poems, and it has all the elements of his earlier poetry: lyrical intensity, wit, social concern, satirical bite, and above all a classical claritas. But it goes much further: there is a deepening of vision and a darker understanding of “our clay condition.” The six long poems in The Secret Meaning of Things show a progressive continuity and clarity of perception that apprehends both the hard reality and luminous irreality in everyday phenomena. In “Assassination Raga”––on the death of Robert Kennedy––the glass through which the poet sees darkly is the television screen; the poem was first read on the night of RFK’s funeral at a mass memorial in San Francisco. “Bickford’s Buddha” is a meditation on “Observation Fever” in Harvard Square, while “All Too Clearly” finds a “touch of old surrealism/at a stoplight in La Jolla.” “Through the Looking Glass” begins with an actual flight aboard a commercial airliner and moves through a psychedelic vision to a final flash of the Dance of Shiva, which in turn opens out into the worldview of “After the Cries of Birds.” “Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow” comes out of Ferlinghetti’s travels to Moscow and across the steppes in the winter of 1967.

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Her

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Translated by Vincent McHugh

With a contribution by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“A surreal semi-autobiographical blackbook record of a semi-mad period of my life, in that mindless, timeless state most romantics pass through, confusing flesh madonnas with spiritual ones.” This is how the author describes this extraordinary expatriate novel. “To all those who have for several years sought to discredit the new American literature, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has just dealt a most powerful blow,” wrote French critic Pierre Lepape in 1961 when Her was published in France as La Quatrième Personne du Singulier. Calling it “a masterpiece of the young American novel,” Lepape declared it was “the confirmation of a great American writer who, in the hall of American literary glories, takes the place left vacant by the death of Hemingway.” Lepape went on to speak of the “incredible verbal virtuosity” by which the reader is led through this “laby-rêve,” and it is this image of the “labyrinth-dream” which relates Her to the anti-novels of the young French school of Robbe-Grillet and Butor.

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A Coney Island of the Mind

The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller’s _Into the Night Life _and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950s—as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul. _A Coney Island of the Mind _is not about the geographical Coney Island. The author intended it as a sustained metaphor or allegory of modern life.

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Starting From San Francisco

Starting From San Francisco, first published in 1961, was the third collection of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry. The long poems of Starting From San Francisco present a new, quieter, more profound aspect of the poet. His original lyricism and caustic humor have been confronted, as it were, with the real presence of evil and death. “Starting from Paumanok… I strike up for a New World” wrote Walt Whitman in 1860. Starting from San Francisco, a hundred years later, Ferlinghetti roved back across the country (this “cradle we rocked out of”) then turned south of the border to visionary conclusions in that lost horizon symbolized by Machu Picchu, the Inca city the Spaniards never found. These poems of voyage are autobiographical in that they grew out of Ferlinghetti’s travels in South America and Europe, but there are also poems on other themes, including several long “broadsides,” which the author identifies as “satirical tirades––poetry admittedly corrupted by the political, itself irradiated by the Thing it attacks.” Commenting on this paperbook edition, to which two important poems, “Berlin” and “The Situation in The West” have been added, Ferlinghetti wrote: “These poems represent to me a kind of halfway house in the ascent of a mountain I hardly knew existed until I stopped and looked back at the flatlands below. Like a Zen fool lost in the woods who laughs and lies face down on the earth to find his way.”

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Shards: Fragments of Verses

Sensual and glimmering, Lorenzo Chiera’s elliptical fragments evoke nights of bawdy excess in Trastevere (“City made of Roman ruins . . . / what a whorehouse!”), translated here by one of the most renowned poets of our time.

In his preface, Lawrence Ferlinghetti describes the experience of reading Chiera for the first time: “We soon realize we are in the presence of a savage erotic consciousness, as if the lust-driven senses were suddenly awakened out of a hoary sleep of a thousand years, a youth shaken awake by a rude medieval hand, senses still reeling, drunk in the hold of some slave ship, not knowing night from day nor sight from sound, the eye and the ear and the nose confounding each other, not yet knowing which function each was to take up in the quivering dawn.”

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Her

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Translated by Vincent McHugh

With a contribution by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“A surreal semi-autobiographical blackbook record of a semi-mad period of my life, in that mindless, timeless state most romantics pass through, confusing flesh madonnas with spiritual ones.” This is how the author describes this extraordinary expatriate novel. “To all those who have for several years sought to discredit the new American literature, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has just dealt a most powerful blow,” wrote French critic Pierre Lepape in 1961 when Her was published in France as La Quatrième Personne du Singulier. Calling it “a masterpiece of the young American novel,” Lepape declared it was “the confirmation of a great American writer who, in the hall of American literary glories, takes the place left vacant by the death of Hemingway.” Lepape went on to speak of the “incredible verbal virtuosity” by which the reader is led through this “laby-rêve,” and it is this image of the “labyrinth-dream” which relates Her to the anti-novels of the young French school of Robbe-Grillet and Butor.

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He has a gift for helping you hear what needs to be said… His high points are the poems that you wish you could listen to in a car, on a long coastal highway with the windows rolled down.

Jeff Gordinier, New York Times

Tenderly lyrical, outrageously irreverent, yet always accessible. ​

Fort Worth Star Telegram

Lawrence gets you laughing then hits you with the truth.

Francis Ford Coppola

A brave man and a brave poet.

Bob Dylan

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a national treasure and the kind of poet laureate we really deserve.

CounterPunch

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s engrossing new work, Time of Useful Consciousness, is an ode to modern American myth. At ninety-two, Ferlinghetti has rhythm, he has vision, and he captures the magic energy of Jack Kerouac.

The Coffin Factory

Ferlinghetti refers to Ginsberg as ’the Whitman of our age,’ but Time of Useful Consciousness has that epic, galvanizing, country-hopping voice of a latter-day Good Gray as Ferlinghetti recreates the pioneer spirit of racing west for gold, for freedom, for art, for land, for the hell of it, for life — as well as all the messy stops along the way.

Christopher Bollen, Interview Magzine

In the spirit of Whitman, [Ferlinghetti] unwinds a country in all its speed and vibrancy.

San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco’s first poet laureate and its most lyrical town crier.

San Francisco Chronicle

Tenderly lyrical, outrageously irreverent, yet always accessible.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Lawrence is my favorite poet, to warn us of the coming of Big Brother. Lawrence gets you laughing, then hits you with the truth. From D-Day to 911 Lawrence is the poet who asks us why the human race is trying to kill itself.

Francis Ford Coppola

Ferlinghetti’s poems burn through modern America’s absurdities and unrepentant historical revision in a glorious rant against mediocrity, greed, capitalism and boring poetry.

Publishers Weekly

As a social phenomenon Coney Island of the Mind is truly remarkable. With roughly a million copies in print, few poetry collections come anywhere close to matching its readership.

The Guardian

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is our determined conscience, our wit and eloquence – our steadfast friend and witness – and our communal wisdom’s articulate, patiently insistent old-time voice. Would that all might stand up as he and be counted!

Robert Creeley

Tenderly lyrical, outrageously irreverent yet always accessible.

Fort Worth Star Telegram

…the foremost chronicler of our time.

Library Journal

Thank you, Lawrence. Viva Ferlinghetti!

Garrison Keillor, San Francisco Chronicle
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