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.