Philip Lamantia

The original American surrealist returns in a new edition of the 1967 classic. "I am eager to do a book of yours," Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote to Philip Lamantia in Nerja, Spain in 1966. "What about Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia?" The missive came at the right time, as Lamantia had recently reembraced the surrealism of his youth and sought to...

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia represents the lifework of the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation. Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) played a major role in shaping the poetics of both the Beat and the Surrealist movements in the United States. First mentored by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, the teenage Lamantia also came to the attention of...