The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

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Charles Bukowski, �The Last Night of the Earth Poems�

Started January 10 � Finished January 12, 2003; 407 pages. Posted 15 January 2003

The fact that this book has the word �Poems� in the title meant that I should avoid it like the plague. I think it�s due to my complete-ist nature, slogging through every thing an author writes, for good or for ill. Witness my problem with people like Kerouac, Steinbeck, Chomsky, DeLillo, and a host of other authors you can identify by last name alone.

And I�ve finished all the Bukowski stuff that was fiction so I should be home free, as I avoid poetry. But I noticed that a lot of his poetry books tend to have short story works in them as well, and so I keep purchasing through his other works. And looking at the list of �Other works by the author,� I�m afraid I�m going to be doing this for a while.

So I suppose it�s fortunate that this wasn�t that horrible stinky poetry that I can�t stand. First of all, there�s no semblance of a structure here.

He just
decides
that he�s going
to
put


a break in the
words


here
and perhaps

here.

And so, if I adjust to the non-uniform spacing (easier to do if you drink while you read, and is there any other way to read Bukowski?), it�s like reading one of his short stories, only they�re really, really short. In the meantime, the pages fly by, and more often than not, the �stories� are kind of neat. Or neat enough to not make me rip the fucking thing into a million pieces.


Rating: Worth working in a used bookstore and getting for really cheap.

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