people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.

Love him or hate him, Charles Bukowski was a bitter, drunken asshole with a gift for putting onto paper all the ugliness and baseness hiding in the human heart. Before jumping into the discovery and thoughts that are the inspiration for this ramble about the dirty old writer, a few moments should be spent on the actual poetry found in this volume. I’ve always enjoyed the earlier Bukowski, before he became too ja More...

Bukowski has so many books of poetry that it almost staggers the imagination; if one were to rank them in over-all quality, i would have to say this is in his top five. But with Bukowski that is really leaving out a lot of books; he has over forty just of poetry alone! But getting back to the book at hand, this is definitely one of his best. Written as his early to mid 1970s underground cult hero/legend status was firmly rising to a peak, this collection shows him to be as much the sensitive suf More...

An Almost Made Up Poem

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous
because we’ never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half More...

Don't tell me I don't get it. I know I probably don't. But Jesus Christ, if I have to read one more poem about the women he's screwed and the women who've screwed him, I'm going to start writing my own collection of poetry about the cereal I eat in the morning and try to publish that.

Granted, I am not a great lover of poetry. And I have very low tolerance for people who want to eloquently bemoan about their shitty lives without seemingly caring to get their shit together. Honestly, I'm not reall More...

Love for this romantic man was when the love of his life packed her bags and left him for eternity, love was shouting and yelling and throwing things to cause pain. In Love Is A Dog From Hell, underlies the secret of a man who knew tough love better than any of us could. There was a lot of love, or what he would call love surrounding his entire life. For Bukowski love came in empty bourbon bottle form or a punch in the face and women who would leave his side to never return before he woke up in More...

Bukowski’s poetry brings to mind the free verse ranting found on scrawled on bathroom stalls with permanent marker. Love is a Dog from Hell provides a collection of his finest prose on woman, every-day living, drinking, and of – of course – love (in its most low and basest forms).



I believe Bukowski is one of the greatest poets in the modern world of poetry not because of his style, topics, rhyme schemes, or his connection with the beats. I believe he is one of the best because of his honesty. L More...

Bukowski. Here's a poem.


I don’t know how many bottles of beer
I have consumed while waiting for things
to get better
I don’t know how much wine and whisky
and beer
mostly beer
I have consumed after
splits with women—
waiting for the phone to ring
waiting for the sound of footsteps,
and the phone to ring
waiting for the sounds of footsteps,
and the phone never rings
until much later
and the footsteps never arrive
until much later
when my stomach is coming up
out of my mouth
they arrive as fresh a More...

So what if people think he was the cliche alcoholic writer. I love Bukowski's writing, particularly his poems. His writing is grumpy and sometimes a bit depressing, but in an interesting and kind of enjoyable way. And though he may have been a womanizer he was definitely not a misogynist, he loved women, a lot.

I don’t know how many bottles of beer
I have consumed while waiting for things
to get better
I don’t know how much wine and whisky
and beer
mostly beer
I have consumed after
splits with women—
wa More...

Уличен поет. Най-големия американски уличен поет. Неприлично, разговорно, сякаш напълно спонтанно слово. Просто враг на неискреността. Всичко това естествено е похват. И когато стихотворенията са толкова много, хватката става видима. Но Буковски няма как да не ни хване с тази разголеност. Няма как.
За последната му стихосбирка Адам Кирш писа в “Ню Йоркър”, че е, както винаги, един вид cri de coeur (вик на сърцето). А също и че привлекателността на неговата поезия идва от комбинацията на обещаниет More...

Havia lido praticamente toda a obra em prosa do Bukowski com enorme satisfação, o que fez dele um dos meus favoritos. De uns anos pra cá criei uma enorme resistência à leitura de poesia. Poesia me confunde, me deixa tonto e com vertigens. Sabendo dessa minha resistência, um amigo meu, pessoa muito sensível e leitor voraz de Bukowski, acreditou que meu apreço pela prosa do velho Hank bastaria para me introduzir sem dificuldades à sua poesia. Ele acertou em cheio! Descobri um outro Bukowski, ainda More...

Reading Bukowski sometimes feels as I imagine licking the bottom of an ashtray would taste like, only for some maybe not so hard to understand reason I can't bring myself to want to lick an ashtray, bottom or top. Who else could write like he does and I like it?

Bukowski has strange sweet spots buried deep inside graphic verse that pull. It's writing so raw, descriptive, and visceral that I'm glad to read his account instead of living it myself. Images come to mind of my uncle, who was nothing o More...

I first found Charles Bukowski when searching for a book for Sarah for Christmas one year. I stumbled upon "Ham On Rye" (in fact I think I mention this same thing in my review of that book), and wondered how I never knew of him sooner. He's raw, and honest, almost embarrassingly so. I was very pleased to hear Sean Penn refer to Mr. Bukowski during an interview (The Actor's Studio I believe it was) and Sean's face just came alive when referring to Bukowski. I decided I needed to make it my missio More...

Charles Bukowski is truly, like, the pinnacle of my literary shame. I spent an good 2 years reading his poetry and trying to like it, 'cos that was the cool thing to do in 2007, all while being completely oblivious to the fact that he's a miserable, disgustingly misogynistic asshole that wrote shit poetry about 90% of the time. And he knew it. And everyone knows it. And I can declare with 99% certainty that you should NEVER trust a man who has read and claims to like Bukowski (and by "read" I me More...

Bukowski is one of those poets you can show to people who swear up & down that poetry is all rhyming & flowers. Even if you hate Bukowski, you must admit that he's an original. I love Bukowski. His poems are a perfect break from the 'real' world. They're brutally honest & lovely in their grotesqueness. This collection is wonderful. Sure it isn't for the faint of heart, but Bukowski really does prove that poetry comes in all shapes & sizes.

Karl on kogu selle aja meie kohal elanud,
tüütu ülemine naaber
väga õhukeste seintega korrusmajas.
Me oleme kuulnud kui Karl on
joonud, nutnud, karjunud, oksendanud või keppinud
ning tippiv põrgumüra kestab vahetpidamata
nõnda, et lõpuks ei tee jalgadel ja kätel enam vahet
ning see ongi terviklikkuse mõttes õigem.
Miskipärast arvame, et ta ei ole õnnelik,
ja sööme oma munaputru ilmse rahuloluga,
nukker muie häbises silmnäos.

Aeg-ajalt, kui ma teda koridoris näen,
pomiseb ta midagi tõelisest armastusest
ja he More...

Perhaps my expectations for Bukowski were too high, but I heard nothing but good things about him. I decided to try him out and thought this would be a good start. I simply didn't like it. Needless to say, I'll try one of his novels as well and see if his prose is any better than his poetry, but I guess this just wasn't for me.

The poetry it broken up into four pieces. The first is about all the women he fucks and how and why and what happened next and honestly after the third or fourth, I almost More...

Bukowski is one of those poets whose work is relatively easy to approach in that it's written in a prose style, and his word choice is something more along the lines of "word choice" instead of "vernacular." Bukowski's poetry is about life: the good, the bad, and the hideous. Yes, there's a lot of sex -- it's Bukowski. Writing about living and being a writer is what makes him interesting, and he knows how to tell a good story and dig that gem of a moment out of the positively mundane. This means More...

I just happened on this one in a bookstore and sat down to read a bit. Whoa! As a junior in high school I was just getting into literature that was off the beaten path, and this just about blew my mind. I ended up writing my junior year literary analysis paper on his prose. It was called "Banality and Booze: Charles Bukowski Doesn't Like You." I was lucky to find him.

I literally just finished this book!

Now, I have to say that before reading this book I knew almost nothing about Bukowski and I have to admit that this book of poems was a good introduction into who he was as a person. Even before I was halfway through the book, I couldn't decided whether I pitied him or admired him. He wrote about what he knew and even though I'm a 19 year old girl and he was in his fifties when he wrote these poems, I found myself identifying with him.. On certain things. I ve More...

A lot of the poems are about sex and drinking and vomiting. And all of them contain a line that could just about make your heart stop with its honesty. Poetry's difficult for me. I love writing it (when the mood strikes) because I find that I can communicate in a completely different way than I can in structured prose. Bukowski makes it look so easy—especially with his poems where he mentions the time (sometimes repeatedly throughout the poem) and the poem feels like it's still in-process, even More...

"Don't bring a whore, I'll only fall in love with her."

The verse appears more than once in Charles Bukowski's set of poems, "Love is a Dog From Hell." The majority of the poems are devoted to the various muses of his life, lovers and exes, some of them overlapping. Each one of these women is studied, catalogued, screwed, licked, tickled, and nailed into this shadowbox of poems like spread eagled Monarch specimens, not a single detail or secret concealed.

The human condition in this volume is show More...

You either love Bukowski or you don't. There is no in between these two choices.

Life as we live it - is depicted in his verses like a nude woman, stripped off all covers and ornaments, bared, with all the beauty and ugliness. There's no pretension, there's no guilt, only bare faces with intense eyes of his muses, and objects and every little nice things and dirty stuff, lots of drunkenness and love, in various forms. I love this book of poems and I don't need to say why. You like reading Bukowsk More...

One of the better Bukowski poetry books, almost as good as The Last Night of the Earth Poems, and a good companion to his novel Women. Whenever Bukowski writes about his father ("My Old Man") or Jane ("Some Picnic") its usually worth reading, and possibly "immortal" (as Bukowski would say). The most ironic poem in the book was "An Unkind Poem" where Bukowski criticizes other poets, and I couldn't help thinking he was unknowingly describing himself through much of the poem. If they are dullards f More...

Among many books by Charles Bukowski.
This one is my favorite.
and here is why -
because this is Bukowski at his rawest
and lowest-
if you didn't or couldn't (or shouldn't)
love or get this,
would not mean that
you should give up on Bukowski
no- there are softer and more 'general' sides
of him that one could find.
but it's probably true that
you will never love him in the way
how he loved women
how he loved Brahm
how he loved beers and cheap wine
how he hated himself then reattached himself.

See this is t More...

This is the first book of poetry from Bukowski I have read. I'm floored. I can see why he is mentioned as a poet first and foremost. These poems are all about women, love, sex and death, which is really all that matters that matter in a man's life anyway. Oh, yeah, there is a lot of drinking also, and some fighting. Some of the poems are shockingly funny, such as "one of the hottest." In one of the shorter poems, entitled, "i have shit stains in my underwear too," he recounts overhearing neighbo More...

For a Friend

I recently lost a friend of mine. This space is not the place to go into detail about it, sorry. But his passing has been difficult for me. Death is never an easy thing to grasp and it becomes much more difficult when it occurs closely to your orbit. I can’t even begin to process it. If my mind were a computer, it most certainly would be outputting an error message these days.

In the aftermath of these events, Charles Bukowski’s poem, “The Crunch,” buoyed me at a time where I felt anc More...

I love, love, love Bukowski. And here is why I love him.

"she wore a platinum blonde wig
and her face was rouged and powdered
and she put the lipstick on
making a huge painted mouth
and her neck was wrinkled
but she still had the ass of a young girl
and the legs were good.
she wore blue panties and I took them off
raised her dress, and with the TV flickering
I took her standing up.
as we struggled around the room
(I'm fucking the grave, I thought, I'm
bringing the dead back to life,
marvelous
so marvelous
like More...

i bought this book as a birthday present for my first love, when i was still in love with him, before i knew i was in love with him, but long after i should have figured it out. we were apart for the summer, and i used post-it notes to make comments where i thought we could have a discussion. it remains the only bukowski collection i've ever read cover to cover. i admire bukowski in a lot of ways, and then there are things about him that i absolutely can't stand. but the realism in his work is u More...

In the midst of a rough breakup, I started dabbling into poetry; Bukowski being my first endevour. This book holds some of the most painful, joyful, intense, funny, sad, and happy poems I've ever read. In one hand, the book explores the downside of relationships: the pain and suffering and jelousies that we all face while in love. On the other hand, he reminds the reader (rarely throughout the book) that even though life can be a shit-show, there are "lights" and "ways out". Hearing that from Bu More...

There were a few poems here that I wanted to go back to. They weren't those angry "bitch left" or "I said she'd better leave now" poems. I wrote their titles in an open notepad file without saving. Then my laptop did a post-update reboot without asking properly. Since it was a library book, there'd be some serious effort in all that now. Eh. A part of me feels it's, well... he wrote so many poems, a few are bound to impress, right? Or maybe people are captivated by the lifestyle he's published a More...