On Love
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About this ebook
A companion to On Writing and On Cats: A raw and tender poetry collection that captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable, on a subject that hits home with all of us.
Charles Bukowski was a man of intense emotions, someone an editor once called a “passionate madman.” In On Love, we see Bukowski reckoning with the complications and exaltations of love, lust, and desire. Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love—its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power.
Bukowski is brilliant on love—often amusing, sometimes playful, and fleetingly sweet. On Love offers deep insight into Bukowski the man and the artist; whether writing about his daughter, his lover, his friends, or his work, he is piercingly honest and poignantly reflective, using love as a prism to see the world in all its beauty and cruelty, and his own fragile place in it. “My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough,” he writes, “as the same cat crouches.”
Brutally honest, flecked with humor and pathos, On Love reveals Bukowski at his most candid and affecting.
Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.
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Reviews for On Love
22 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What I love about Bukowski is what others mostly hate: he is offensive, appalling, and unrefined. But underneath all the unrelenting cheekiness, candid sexual musings, and impertinent rudeness is a tender, honest, and resonating meditation on people's multifaceted, ever-changing, complicated emotions (no matter how dirty). On Love is packed with sex, women, and booze (as expected of him) but they're also intermingled with thoughts on love in its many forms — paternal, platonic, romantic — and it is also love in memories, love lost and forgotten, love as an idea, and love in its most disgusting, selfish, hilarious, solitary, ridiculous and affecting sentences and punctuation marks which, I feel, sets Bukowski aside with other poets. Bukowski's lyricism is unapologetic, sentimental and this is one of his most lovely collections.(His poem an acceptance slip made me shed a few tears).A couple of unforgettable lines —** "I look to my left and see a man picking his nose;he slides the residue under achair; quite true, I think, there's yourtruth, and there's your love:snot hardening under a chair duringhot nights when hell comes up and simplyspits all overyou."— from ALL THE LOVE OF ME GOES OUT TO HER (A.M.)** "Linda, you brought it to me,when you take it awaydo it slowly and easilymake it as if I were dying in my sleep instead of inmy life, amen."— from THE SHOWER** "she wants me to write a love poembut I think if peoplecan't love each other'sassholesand farts and shits and terrible partsjust like they lovethe good parts,that ain't complete love."— from THE BEST LOVE POEM I CAN WRITE AT THE MOMENTPersonal favourites: layover, shoes, for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough, for Jane, notice, my real love in Athens, poem to my daughter, 2 carnations, the best love poem I can write at the moment, love poem to Marina, the first love, a love poem, for all the women I know, a definition, an acceptance slip, one for old snaggle-tooth, I made a mistake, yes, we get along, eulogy, the strong man, the blue bird, the dressmaker, confessions and all the love of me goes out to her (for A.M.)