The early poems of an American master
"I have loved the air outside Shop-Rite Liquor
on summer evenings
better than the Marin hills at dusk
lavender and gold
stretching miles to the sea.
At the junction, up from the synagogue
a weeknight, necessarily
and with my father—
a sale on German beer.
Air full of living dust:
bus exhaust, air-borne grains of pizza crust
wounded crystals
appearing, disappearing
among streetlights and unsuccessful neon."
—"Poetics"
August Kleinzahler's first collections won him a cult following but have long been out of print and hard to find. Here Kleinzahler—acclaimed by
The Times
(London) for the "vision and confident skill to make American poetry new"—has selected the best of the poems collected in
Storm over Hackensack
(1985) and
Earthquake Weather
(1989) and added an autobiographical Preface.