Love Is a Dog from Hell

A classic in the Bukowski poetry canon, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a raw, lyrical, exploration of the exigencies, heartbreaks, and limits of love.

A book 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." 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.

"there is a loneliness in this world so great

that you can see it in the slow movement of

the hands of a clock."

ISBN-13: 9780876853627

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Publication Date: 05-31-2002

Pages: 312

Product Dimensions: 5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

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.

Read an Excerpt

Love is a Dog From Hell

Sandra

is the slim tall
ear-ringed
bedroom damsel
dressed in a long
gown

she's always high
in heels
spirit
pills
booze

Sandra leans out of
her chair
leans toward
Glendale

I wait for her head
to hit the closet
doorknob
as she attempts to
light
a new cigarette on an
almost burnt-out
one

at 32 she likes
young neat
unscratched boys
with faces like the bottoms
of new saucers

she has proclaimed as much
to me
has brought her prizes

over for me to view:
silent blonde zeros of young
flesh
who
a) sit
b) stand
c) talk at her command

sometimes she brings one
sometimes two
sometimes three
for me to
view

Sandra looks very good in
long gowns
Sandra could probably break
a man's heart

I hope she finds
one.

Love is a Dog From Hell. Copyright © by Charles Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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