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.”