Series: City Lights Pocket Poets Series

Expanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic of eco-feminist-Zen Beat poetry, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals on the one-year anniversary of her passing. By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern...

Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places.Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse...

Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems was originally published by City Lights Books in the autumn of 1956. Subsequently seized by U.S. customs and the San Francisco police, it became the subject of a lengthy court trial, during which a series of poets and professors successfully argued before the court that the book was not obscene. Howl and Other Poems...

Spontaneous poetry by the author of On the Road, gathered from underground and ephemeral publications; including "San Francisco Blues," the variant texts of "Pull My Daisy," and "American haiku." HERE DOWN ON DARK EARTH before we all go to Heaven VISIONS OF AMERICA All that hitchhikin' All that railroadin' All that comin' back to America - Jack Kerouac Jack Kerouac...

Gasoline & Vestal Lady on Brattle is volume number 8 in the City Lights Pocket Series. "Open this book as you would a box of crazy toys, take in your hands a refinement of beauty out of a destructive atmosphere. These combinations are imaginary and pure, in accordance with Corso's individual (therefore universal) desire." - Allen Ginsberg "Gregory is a...

One of Publishers Weekly's Most Anticipated Books for Fall 2016 "Cortázar's verse is more traditional than his fiction, but his style and themes are in harmony across genres: eccentric, mystical, full of animals but deeply human. Cortázar is a people's poet, accessible from every angle, and his position as a titan of the Latin American boom is indisputable." - Publishers...

In the activist verse of this poetic warrior, always committed, the actual world is never out of mind, even in his most intimate poems. Kabbalist, populist, and communist, Hirschman has published over sixty books of his own poetry, and this representative selection is a cross-section of his poetic output, spanning many years and mutations. When he reads aloud, the words...

National Book Award for Poetry, 1973 Beginning with "long poem of these States," The Fall of America continues Planet News chronicle tape-recorded scribed by hand or sung condensed, the flux of car bus airplane dream consciousness Person during Automated Electronic War years, newspaper headline radio brain auto poesy & silent desk musings, headline flashing on road through these states of...

The Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and always a poet—the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on...

"Printer's ink is the greater explosive." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the City Lights publishing house sixty years ago in 1955, launching the press with his now legendary Pocket Poets Series. First in the series was Pictures of the Gone World—and within a year, he had brought out two more volumes, translations by Kenneth Rexroth and then, poems by...

From Will Alexander, finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, comes a new collection of poems from the intersection between surrealism and afro-futurism, where Cesaire meets Sun Ra. Divine Blue Light further affirms Alexander's status as one of the most unique and innovative voices in contemporary poetry. One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Notable Poetry Books for Fall 2022!...

Shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize Winner of the 2018 California Book Award - Poetry 2018 NCIBA Book of the Year - Poetry The much-awaited second book by a truly revolutionary poet, in the lineage of Gil Scott-Heron, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde. "Eisen-Martin's impeccable collection is a crucial document of this time." - Publishers Weekly, starred review...

Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry. Edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his...

Cristina Peri Rossi was born in Uruguay and is considered a leading light of the "Latin American Boom" generation. In 1972, after her work was banned under a repressive military regime, she left her country, moving to Spain. This collection of poems, written during her journey and the first period of her self-exile, was so personal that it remained unpublished...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti has influenced American culture like few other poets. But in 1955, shortly before he would gain fame as the beloved author of A Coney Island of the Mind, he was an unpublished and mostly unknown poet. He launched City Lights Publishers that year with a five-hundred-copy letterpress edition of Pictures of the Gone World, Number One in the...