Bukowski's Love is a Dog from Hell
150 poems about women, drink, the racetrack, and the life of the margins. Bukowski at his most confessional, most funny, most honest about failure and desire.
Bukowski wrote these poems between 1974 and 1977, living in Los Angeles, going to the track, drinking, writing. There are 150 of them. They are about the same things all of Bukowski is about: women who leave, men who drink, rooms that are too small, and the strange grace of keeping going anyway.
The confessional mode
Bukowski's great subject is failure without self-pity. He lost jobs, relationships, years. He turned all of it into poems that read like overheard conversation — casual, direct, sometimes funny, occasionally shattering. The language is low, the sentiment is not. These poems are sentimental in the original sense: they feel things fully, without apology.
Why it matters to serious readers
Literary readers sometimes dismiss Bukowski as too rough, too popular, too barroom. The dismissal is wrong. What he does with line breaks, with the casual revelation, with the specific image that unlocks the whole poem — these are technical achievements. The apparent artlessness is the art. It takes years to write this badly on purpose.
“Some lose all mind and become soul, insane.
Some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
Some lose both and become accepted.”
Read one poem. Then read fifty more. The accumulation is where Bukowski lives.
Essential Bukowski. Raw and funny and honest about failure in ways that feel less like poetry and more like someone telling the truth at closing time.
Flash fiction and poetry in the tradition of what you just read. Written on the road. Over 1,200 readers. Free.
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