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Book of Haikus

Part of Penguin Poets

Author Jack Kerouac
Introduction by Regina Weinreich
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Paperback
$16.00 US
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books
On sale Apr 01, 2003 | 240 Pages | 978-0-14-200264-3
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  • English > Literature > American Literature – 20th Century
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Highlighting a lesser-known aspect of one of America's most influential authors, this new collection displays Jack Kerouac's interest in and mastery of haiku. Experimenting with this compact poetic genre throughout his career, Kerouac often included haiku in novels, correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In this collection, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich supplements an incomplete draft of a haiku manuscript found in Kerouac's archives with a generous selection of Kerouac's other haiku, from both published and unpublished sources. With more than 500 poems, this is a must-have volume for Kerouac enthusiasts everywhere.

PENGUIN BOOKS

BOOK OF HAIKUS

JACK KEROUAC was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, first published in 1957, that made Kerouac one of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums, in which he describes his discovery of haiku. Kerouac’s books of poetry include Mexico City Blues, Scattered Poems, Pomes All Sizes, Heaven and Other Poems, and Book of Blues. Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

REGINA WEINREICH teaches in the Department of Humanities and Sciences at the School of Visual Arts in New York and has published widely in periodicals including The New York Times, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, and in the literary journals The Paris Review and Five Points. She is the author of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics: A Study of the Fiction. She was a writer on the documentary The Beat Generation: An American Dream and a producer/director of Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider.

by Jack Kerouac

the town and the city

the scripture of the golden eternity

some of the dharma

old angel midnight

good blonde and others

pull my daisy

trip trap

pic

the portable jack kerouac

selected letters: 1940–1956

selected letters: 1957–1969

atop an underwood

orpheus emerged

POETRY

mexico city blues

scattered poems

pomes all sizes

heaven and other poems

book of blues

THE DULUOZ LEGEND

visions of gerard

doctor sax

maggie cassidy

vanity of duluoz

on the road

visions of cody

the subterraneans

tristessa

lonesome traveller

desolation angels

the dharma bums

book of dreams

big sur

satori in paris

Jack Kerouac

BOOK
OF
HAIKUS

Edited and with an Introduction by

Regina Weinreich

Then I’ll invent

The American Haiku type:

The simple rhyming triolet:—

Seventeen syllables?

No, as I say, American Pops:—

Simple 3-line poems

Reading Notes 1965

Introduction: The Haiku Poetics of Jack Kerouac

The American writer Jack Kerouac is mostly known as a prose fiction stylist. He is famous for his bestselling novel On the Road and for having spawned the Beat Generation. For some, images of rebellious hipsters come to mind, as well as a beat determination not to revise, first thought best thought. But careful readers of Kerouac’s prose recognize that within the ragged, circular, soulful cadences for which his writing is at once criticized, imitated and revered is the rhythmic phrasing of poetry.

Among the literati who knew him best, Jack Kerouac was a poet supreme who worked in several poetry traditions, including sonnets, odes, psalms, and blues (which he based on blues and jazz idioms). He also successfully adapted haiku into English, his “American haikus.”1 “‘Haiku,’” he wrote, “was invented and developed over hundreds of years in Japan to be a complete poem in seventeen syllables and to pack in a whole vision of life in three short lines.” Finding that Western languages cannot adapt themselves to the “fluid syllabillic Japanese,” he sought to redefine the genre:

“I propose that the ‘Western Haiku’ simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language. Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella. Here is a great Japanese Haiku that is simpler and prettier than any Haiku I could ever write in any language:—

A day of quiet gladness,—

Mount Fuji is veiled

In misty rain.    (Bashō) (1644–1694)

Thus, in this tradition, Kerouac wrote:

Birds singing

in the dark

Rainy dawn

Kerouac composed this and hundreds more haiku in notebooks dated from 1956 to 1966. These small, bound notebooks—the kind he could press into his checkered lumberman’s shirt pocket and carry around anywhere for fresh and spontaneous entries—contain a huge cache of his three-line jottings, a mother lode, so to speak, from which he selected what would comprise his Book of Haikus, a collection he urged Lawrence Ferlinghetti to publish in 1961. Five Working Notebooks dated 1961–1965 are another source of haiku, and more were embedded in novels, letters, or published in small literary magazines. Twenty-six, some chosen for a 1964 anthology of American verse edited by his Italian translator, Fernanda Pivano, were published posthumously in 1971 by City Lights in Scattered Poems. A manuscript page (Berg Collection of the New York Public Library) indicates Kerouac’s intentions.

Jack Kerouac was not the first American poet to experiment in haiku aesthetics. Before him, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, and Wallace Stevens all created haiku-inspired verse. It was not until after the Second World War that a “rigorous and informed attention to the genre”2 arose, with the first volume of R. H. Blyth’s four-volume Haiku appearing in 1949, bringing the classical traditions of haiku and Zen to the West.

Kerouac turned to Buddhist study and practice after his “road” period, from 1953 until 1956, in the lull between the writing of the seminal On the Road in 1951,2 and its publication in 1957—that is, before fame changed everything. When he finished The Subterraneans in the fall of 1953, fed up with the world after the failed love affair on which the book was based, he picked up Thoreau and fantasized a life separate from civilization. Then he happened upon Asvaghosha’s The Life of Buddha and immersed himself in Zen study.

Kerouac began his genre-defying book Some of the Dharma in 1953 as a collection of reader’s notes on Dwight Goddard’s The Buddhist Bible; the endeavor grew into a massive compilation of spiritual material, meditations, prayers, and haiku, a study of his musings on the teaching of Buddha. By 1955, while living in North Carolina with his sister, he worked on two other Buddhist-related texts: Wake Up, his own biography of the Buddha, and Buddha Tells Us, translations of “works done by great Rimbauvian Frenchmen at the Abbeys of Tibet,” what he refers to in his letters as “a full length Buddhist Handbook.”

Haiku came to the West Coast poets through Gary Snyder. Inspired by D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927) in the fall of 1951, Snyder spent the early ’50s traveling in Japan, studying and practicing Zen Buddhism. Philip Whalen and Lew Welch became avid haiku practitioners through his influence. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, and Whalen spent time together in Berkeley in 1955 talking, drinking, and trading their own versions of Blyth’s haiku translations, which they were reading in all four volumes. Through Blyth’s translations and his extraordinary commentary on the Japanese works, Kerouac found emotive and aesthetic sympathies. Even though he attempted to meditate, wrote a sutra, “The Scripture of the Golden Eternity” (1956) at Gary Snyder’s behest, and thought of his entire oeuvre, his Legend of Duluoz, as a “Divine Comedy” based on Buddha,3 Buddhism stayed a literary concern for him, not a meditative or spiritual practice, as it was for Snyder and Whalen. Later, when he told Ted Berrigan in his 1968 Paris Review interview he was a serious Buddhist, but not a Zen Buddhist, the distinction was to separate his interest from the prevalent scholarly study of dogma in favor of Buddhist essence.4 The practice of haiku, however, persisted throughout his life, becoming an important medium for rendering the Beat ideal of “shapely mind,” and for crafting an American Mysticism in the manner of Thoreau. For a new generation of poets, Kerouac ended up breaking ground at a pioneering stage of an American haiku movement.

Finding these haiku was a bit like extracting gold from baser metals, so embedded were many of them (nearly 1,000) in blocks of prose, scribble, and even street addresses. Many reappear throughout his work, because Kerouac recycled his haiku, using them in different ways.

Traditional haiku collections are organized by season or subject, but that did not seem an appropriate way to present Kerouac’s haiku. Part I of this volume is comprised of haiku he selected himself. The chronological organization of the haiku in Part II seemed the best way to give a sense of the evolution of the work, as well as to see each poem in its own light. Handy for this approach, Kerouac, in a 1963 journal, divided up his life according to the seasonal haiku reference, and so, following his idea, I have taken Spring and Summer as the period before the publication of On the Road, Autumn and Winter as after, in his later years.5

This book endeavors to include examples of the entire range of Kerouac’s haiku—those which he selected for publication (The Book of Haikus found in a black folder so named) and poems in those subcategories by which he experimented in haiku possibilities: the philosophical “pops” as well as the angry, emotionally blunt “beat generation haikus.” As with all of Kerouac’s work in prose and poetry, process is key to his search for more refined language.

Allen Ginsberg spoke perhaps hyperbolically of Kerouac as the “only master of the haiku: He’s the only one in the United States who knows how to write haiku . . . [he] talks that way, thinks that way.”6 What Kerouac “got” perhaps more than any other Beat poet working in this genre was the rendering of a subject’s essence, and the shimmering, ephemeral nature of its fleeting existence. This sensitivity to impermanence appears again and again in his work, from The Town and the City, constructed around the death of the father, through The Book of Dreams, which evokes the frail individual beset with a harsh, indifferent society, at times succumbing, defeated.

One of Kerouac’s classic haiku images is of a sole animate entity in a wide, cavernous expanse:

The windmills of

Oklahoma look

In every direction

And, from a 1960 notebook:

One flower

on the cliffside

Nodding at the canyon

That isolated being—here “look[ing]” or “nodding”—is the quintessential Kerouacean persona seen again and again in his Legend of Duluoz.

Seeking visual possibilities in language, Kerouac combined his spontaneous prose with sketching, a technique suggested to him by Ed White, a friend during his Columbia University days in the late ’40s: Why don’t you sketch in the streets like a painter but with words?

“‘Keep the eye STEADILY on the object,’ for haiku,” he exhorted himself in his notebooks. “WRITE HAIKUS THEN PAINT THE SCENE DESCRIBING THEM!” He also likened good haiku to good painting. The best haiku gave him “the sensation I get looking at a great painting by Van Gogh, it’s there & nothing you can say or do about it, except look in dismay at the power of looking.”

Kerouac also recognized the purposeful caesura or cut of Japanese haiku as key to its sound and sense. Quoting Shakespeare in a 1963 Notebook, Kerouac wrote: “birds sit brooding in the snow’ (combining the thought as well as the sound of the ellipse of a JAP haiku) always wondered where did he get that sound? & always think, that’s what I like about S, where he revels in the great world night.” The extraordinary juxtapositions often noted in Kerouac’s sketched prose—in Visions of Cody (written in 1951 and 1952, a portion published in 1959 as Visions of Neal), Doctor Sax (written in July 1952, published in 1959), and “October in the Railroad Earth,” (1952)—especially evoke haiku spirit, even before he was fully immersed in composing haiku.

. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven. View titles by Jack Kerouac

About

Highlighting a lesser-known aspect of one of America's most influential authors, this new collection displays Jack Kerouac's interest in and mastery of haiku. Experimenting with this compact poetic genre throughout his career, Kerouac often included haiku in novels, correspondence, notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, and recordings. In this collection, Kerouac scholar Regina Weinreich supplements an incomplete draft of a haiku manuscript found in Kerouac's archives with a generous selection of Kerouac's other haiku, from both published and unpublished sources. With more than 500 poems, this is a must-have volume for Kerouac enthusiasts everywhere.

Excerpt

PENGUIN BOOKS

BOOK OF HAIKUS

JACK KEROUAC was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, first published in 1957, that made Kerouac one of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Subterraneans, Big Sur, and The Dharma Bums, in which he describes his discovery of haiku. Kerouac’s books of poetry include Mexico City Blues, Scattered Poems, Pomes All Sizes, Heaven and Other Poems, and Book of Blues. Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

REGINA WEINREICH teaches in the Department of Humanities and Sciences at the School of Visual Arts in New York and has published widely in periodicals including The New York Times, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, and in the literary journals The Paris Review and Five Points. She is the author of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics: A Study of the Fiction. She was a writer on the documentary The Beat Generation: An American Dream and a producer/director of Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider.

by Jack Kerouac

the town and the city

the scripture of the golden eternity

some of the dharma

old angel midnight

good blonde and others

pull my daisy

trip trap

pic

the portable jack kerouac

selected letters: 1940–1956

selected letters: 1957–1969

atop an underwood

orpheus emerged

POETRY

mexico city blues

scattered poems

pomes all sizes

heaven and other poems

book of blues

THE DULUOZ LEGEND

visions of gerard

doctor sax

maggie cassidy

vanity of duluoz

on the road

visions of cody

the subterraneans

tristessa

lonesome traveller

desolation angels

the dharma bums

book of dreams

big sur

satori in paris

Jack Kerouac

BOOK
OF
HAIKUS

Edited and with an Introduction by

Regina Weinreich

Then I’ll invent

The American Haiku type:

The simple rhyming triolet:—

Seventeen syllables?

No, as I say, American Pops:—

Simple 3-line poems

Reading Notes 1965

Introduction: The Haiku Poetics of Jack Kerouac

The American writer Jack Kerouac is mostly known as a prose fiction stylist. He is famous for his bestselling novel On the Road and for having spawned the Beat Generation. For some, images of rebellious hipsters come to mind, as well as a beat determination not to revise, first thought best thought. But careful readers of Kerouac’s prose recognize that within the ragged, circular, soulful cadences for which his writing is at once criticized, imitated and revered is the rhythmic phrasing of poetry.

Among the literati who knew him best, Jack Kerouac was a poet supreme who worked in several poetry traditions, including sonnets, odes, psalms, and blues (which he based on blues and jazz idioms). He also successfully adapted haiku into English, his “American haikus.”1 “‘Haiku,’” he wrote, “was invented and developed over hundreds of years in Japan to be a complete poem in seventeen syllables and to pack in a whole vision of life in three short lines.” Finding that Western languages cannot adapt themselves to the “fluid syllabillic Japanese,” he sought to redefine the genre:

“I propose that the ‘Western Haiku’ simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language. Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella. Here is a great Japanese Haiku that is simpler and prettier than any Haiku I could ever write in any language:—

A day of quiet gladness,—

Mount Fuji is veiled

In misty rain.    (Bashō) (1644–1694)

Thus, in this tradition, Kerouac wrote:

Birds singing

in the dark

Rainy dawn

Kerouac composed this and hundreds more haiku in notebooks dated from 1956 to 1966. These small, bound notebooks—the kind he could press into his checkered lumberman’s shirt pocket and carry around anywhere for fresh and spontaneous entries—contain a huge cache of his three-line jottings, a mother lode, so to speak, from which he selected what would comprise his Book of Haikus, a collection he urged Lawrence Ferlinghetti to publish in 1961. Five Working Notebooks dated 1961–1965 are another source of haiku, and more were embedded in novels, letters, or published in small literary magazines. Twenty-six, some chosen for a 1964 anthology of American verse edited by his Italian translator, Fernanda Pivano, were published posthumously in 1971 by City Lights in Scattered Poems. A manuscript page (Berg Collection of the New York Public Library) indicates Kerouac’s intentions.

Jack Kerouac was not the first American poet to experiment in haiku aesthetics. Before him, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, and Wallace Stevens all created haiku-inspired verse. It was not until after the Second World War that a “rigorous and informed attention to the genre”2 arose, with the first volume of R. H. Blyth’s four-volume Haiku appearing in 1949, bringing the classical traditions of haiku and Zen to the West.

Kerouac turned to Buddhist study and practice after his “road” period, from 1953 until 1956, in the lull between the writing of the seminal On the Road in 1951,2 and its publication in 1957—that is, before fame changed everything. When he finished The Subterraneans in the fall of 1953, fed up with the world after the failed love affair on which the book was based, he picked up Thoreau and fantasized a life separate from civilization. Then he happened upon Asvaghosha’s The Life of Buddha and immersed himself in Zen study.

Kerouac began his genre-defying book Some of the Dharma in 1953 as a collection of reader’s notes on Dwight Goddard’s The Buddhist Bible; the endeavor grew into a massive compilation of spiritual material, meditations, prayers, and haiku, a study of his musings on the teaching of Buddha. By 1955, while living in North Carolina with his sister, he worked on two other Buddhist-related texts: Wake Up, his own biography of the Buddha, and Buddha Tells Us, translations of “works done by great Rimbauvian Frenchmen at the Abbeys of Tibet,” what he refers to in his letters as “a full length Buddhist Handbook.”

Haiku came to the West Coast poets through Gary Snyder. Inspired by D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927) in the fall of 1951, Snyder spent the early ’50s traveling in Japan, studying and practicing Zen Buddhism. Philip Whalen and Lew Welch became avid haiku practitioners through his influence. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, and Whalen spent time together in Berkeley in 1955 talking, drinking, and trading their own versions of Blyth’s haiku translations, which they were reading in all four volumes. Through Blyth’s translations and his extraordinary commentary on the Japanese works, Kerouac found emotive and aesthetic sympathies. Even though he attempted to meditate, wrote a sutra, “The Scripture of the Golden Eternity” (1956) at Gary Snyder’s behest, and thought of his entire oeuvre, his Legend of Duluoz, as a “Divine Comedy” based on Buddha,3 Buddhism stayed a literary concern for him, not a meditative or spiritual practice, as it was for Snyder and Whalen. Later, when he told Ted Berrigan in his 1968 Paris Review interview he was a serious Buddhist, but not a Zen Buddhist, the distinction was to separate his interest from the prevalent scholarly study of dogma in favor of Buddhist essence.4 The practice of haiku, however, persisted throughout his life, becoming an important medium for rendering the Beat ideal of “shapely mind,” and for crafting an American Mysticism in the manner of Thoreau. For a new generation of poets, Kerouac ended up breaking ground at a pioneering stage of an American haiku movement.

Finding these haiku was a bit like extracting gold from baser metals, so embedded were many of them (nearly 1,000) in blocks of prose, scribble, and even street addresses. Many reappear throughout his work, because Kerouac recycled his haiku, using them in different ways.

Traditional haiku collections are organized by season or subject, but that did not seem an appropriate way to present Kerouac’s haiku. Part I of this volume is comprised of haiku he selected himself. The chronological organization of the haiku in Part II seemed the best way to give a sense of the evolution of the work, as well as to see each poem in its own light. Handy for this approach, Kerouac, in a 1963 journal, divided up his life according to the seasonal haiku reference, and so, following his idea, I have taken Spring and Summer as the period before the publication of On the Road, Autumn and Winter as after, in his later years.5

This book endeavors to include examples of the entire range of Kerouac’s haiku—those which he selected for publication (The Book of Haikus found in a black folder so named) and poems in those subcategories by which he experimented in haiku possibilities: the philosophical “pops” as well as the angry, emotionally blunt “beat generation haikus.” As with all of Kerouac’s work in prose and poetry, process is key to his search for more refined language.

Allen Ginsberg spoke perhaps hyperbolically of Kerouac as the “only master of the haiku: He’s the only one in the United States who knows how to write haiku . . . [he] talks that way, thinks that way.”6 What Kerouac “got” perhaps more than any other Beat poet working in this genre was the rendering of a subject’s essence, and the shimmering, ephemeral nature of its fleeting existence. This sensitivity to impermanence appears again and again in his work, from The Town and the City, constructed around the death of the father, through The Book of Dreams, which evokes the frail individual beset with a harsh, indifferent society, at times succumbing, defeated.

One of Kerouac’s classic haiku images is of a sole animate entity in a wide, cavernous expanse:

The windmills of

Oklahoma look

In every direction

And, from a 1960 notebook:

One flower

on the cliffside

Nodding at the canyon

That isolated being—here “look[ing]” or “nodding”—is the quintessential Kerouacean persona seen again and again in his Legend of Duluoz.

Seeking visual possibilities in language, Kerouac combined his spontaneous prose with sketching, a technique suggested to him by Ed White, a friend during his Columbia University days in the late ’40s: Why don’t you sketch in the streets like a painter but with words?

“‘Keep the eye STEADILY on the object,’ for haiku,” he exhorted himself in his notebooks. “WRITE HAIKUS THEN PAINT THE SCENE DESCRIBING THEM!” He also likened good haiku to good painting. The best haiku gave him “the sensation I get looking at a great painting by Van Gogh, it’s there & nothing you can say or do about it, except look in dismay at the power of looking.”

Kerouac also recognized the purposeful caesura or cut of Japanese haiku as key to its sound and sense. Quoting Shakespeare in a 1963 Notebook, Kerouac wrote: “birds sit brooding in the snow’ (combining the thought as well as the sound of the ellipse of a JAP haiku) always wondered where did he get that sound? & always think, that’s what I like about S, where he revels in the great world night.” The extraordinary juxtapositions often noted in Kerouac’s sketched prose—in Visions of Cody (written in 1951 and 1952, a portion published in 1959 as Visions of Neal), Doctor Sax (written in July 1952, published in 1959), and “October in the Railroad Earth,” (1952)—especially evoke haiku spirit, even before he was fully immersed in composing haiku.

. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the most best-known writers of his time. Publication of many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. Kerouac considered all of his autobiographical fiction to be part of “one vast book,” The Duluoz Legend. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven. View titles by Jack Kerouac

Additional formats

  • Book of Haikus
    Book of Haikus
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    978-1-101-66488-9
    $11.99 US
    Ebook
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    Apr 01, 2013
  • Book of Haikus
    Book of Haikus
    Jack Kerouac
    978-1-101-66488-9
    $11.99 US
    Ebook
    Penguin Books
    Apr 01, 2013

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  • Walkman
    Walkman
    Michael Robbins
    978-0-14-313490-9
    $20.00 US
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  • The Life
    The Life
    Carrie Fountain
    978-0-14-313601-9
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 27, 2021
  • Index of Women
    Index of Women
    Amy Gerstler
    978-0-14-313621-7
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Apr 06, 2021
  • Little Big Bully
    Little Big Bully
    Heid E. Erdrich
    978-0-14-313592-0
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Oct 06, 2020
  • Owed
    Owed
    Joshua Bennett
    978-0-14-313385-8
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 01, 2020
  • The Nightfields
    The Nightfields
    Joanna Klink
    978-0-14-313539-5
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jul 07, 2020
  • Tertulia
    Tertulia
    Vincent Toro
    978-0-14-313534-0
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jun 02, 2020
  • Lean Against This Late Hour
    Lean Against This Late Hour
    Garous Abdolmalekian
    978-0-14-313493-0
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Apr 14, 2020
  • For the Ride
    For the Ride
    Alice Notley
    978-0-14-313457-2
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 03, 2020
  • Fear of Description
    Fear of Description
    Daniel Poppick
    978-0-14-313438-1
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Oct 01, 2019
  • Forage
    Forage
    Rose McLarney
    978-0-14-313319-3
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 03, 2019
  • Spiritual Exercises
    Spiritual Exercises
    Mark Yakich
    978-0-14-313327-8
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jul 02, 2019
  • Sightseer in This Killing City
    Sightseer in This Killing City
    Eugene Gloria
    978-0-14-313384-1
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jun 04, 2019
  • The Crazy Bunch
    The Crazy Bunch
    Willie Perdomo
    978-0-14-313269-1
    $18.00 US
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    Apr 02, 2019
  • Dolefully, A Rampart Stands
    Dolefully, A Rampart Stands
    Paige Ackerson-Kiely
    978-0-14-313268-4
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Feb 05, 2019
  • Museum of the Americas
    Museum of the Americas
    J. Michael Martinez
    978-0-14-313344-5
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Oct 02, 2018
  • Spell
    Spell
    Ann Lauterbach
    978-0-14-313352-0
    $22.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Oct 02, 2018
  • Trickster Feminism
    Trickster Feminism
    Anne Waldman
    978-0-14-313236-3
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jul 03, 2018
  • American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
    American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
    Terrance Hayes
    978-0-14-313318-6
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jun 19, 2018
  • Blue Rose
    Blue Rose
    Carol Muske-Dukes
    978-0-14-313125-0
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Apr 03, 2018
  • Night School
    Night School
    Carl Dennis
    978-0-14-313235-6
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Apr 03, 2018
  • Rift of Light
    Rift of Light
    William Logan
    978-0-14-313182-3
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Oct 03, 2017
  • Madness
    Madness
    Sam Sax
    978-0-14-313170-0
    $18.00 US
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    Sep 12, 2017
  • In Darwin's Room
    In Darwin's Room
    Debora Greger
    978-0-14-313131-1
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jun 06, 2017
  • Quickening Fields
    Quickening Fields
    Pattiann Rogers
    978-0-14-313132-8
    $20.00 US
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    Jun 06, 2017
  • Box
    Box
    Robert Wrigley
    978-0-14-313056-7
    $18.00 US
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    Mar 28, 2017
  • Map to the Stars
    Map to the Stars
    Adrian Matejka
    978-0-14-313057-4
    $18.00 US
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    Mar 28, 2017
  • Stairway to Heaven
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    Poems
    Alison Hawthorne Deming
    978-0-14-310885-6
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 27, 2016
  • The Sobbing School
    The Sobbing School
    Joshua Bennett
    978-0-14-311186-3
    $20.00 US
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    Sep 27, 2016
  • Certain Magical Acts
    Certain Magical Acts
    Alice Notley
    978-0-14-310816-0
    $21.00 US
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    Jun 07, 2016
  • Plenty
    Plenty
    Corinne Lee
    978-0-14-310817-7
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jun 07, 2016
  • Mr. Memory & Other Poems
    Mr. Memory & Other Poems
    Phillis Levin
    978-0-14-312811-3
    $18.00 US
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    Mar 29, 2016
  • A Woman of Property
    A Woman of Property
    Robyn Schiff
    978-0-14-312827-4
    $20.00 US
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    Mar 08, 2016
  • Viability
    Viability
    Sarah Vap
    978-0-698-40735-0
    $9.99 US
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    Jan 26, 2016
  • It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful
    It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful
    Lia Purpura
    978-0-14-312690-4
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 29, 2015
  • Scattered at Sea
    Scattered at Sea
    Amy Gerstler
    978-0-14-312689-8
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    May 26, 2015
  • Dark Energy
    Dark Energy
    Poems
    Robert Morgan
    978-0-14-312806-9
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    May 26, 2015
  • Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy
    Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy
    Joanna Klink
    978-0-14-312687-4
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 31, 2015
  • How to Be Drawn
    How to Be Drawn
    Terrance Hayes
    978-0-14-312688-1
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 31, 2015
  • Instant Winner
    Instant Winner
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    Carrie Fountain
    978-0-14-312663-8
    $20.00 US
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    Sep 30, 2014
  • The Second Sex
    The Second Sex
    Michael Robbins
    978-0-14-312664-5
    $18.00 US
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    Sep 30, 2014
  • Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
    Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals
    Patricia Lockwood
    978-0-14-312652-2
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  • Its Day Being Gone
    Its Day Being Gone
    Rose McLarney
    978-0-14-312657-7
    $20.00 US
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    May 27, 2014
  • Another Reason
    Another Reason
    Carl Dennis
    978-0-14-312522-8
    $18.00 US
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  • The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon
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    Willie Perdomo
    978-0-14-312523-5
    $18.00 US
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    Mar 25, 2014
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    Holy Heathen Rhapsody
    Pattiann Rogers
    978-0-14-312388-0
    $20.00 US
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    Sep 24, 2013
  • Under the Sign
    Under the Sign
    Ann Lauterbach
    978-0-14-312418-4
    $22.00 US
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    Sep 24, 2013
  • The Narrow Circle
    The Narrow Circle
    Nathan Hoks
    978-1-101-61309-2
    $14.99 US
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    Jun 04, 2013
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    The Big Smoke
    Adrian Matejka
    978-0-14-312372-9
    $20.00 US
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    May 28, 2013
  • Gossamurmur
    Gossamurmur
    Anne Waldman
    978-0-14-312308-8
    $22.00 US
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    Apr 30, 2013
  • Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems
    Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems
    Robert Wrigley
    978-0-14-312307-1
    $20.00 US
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    Mar 26, 2013
  • My Favorite Warlord
    My Favorite Warlord
    Eugene Gloria
    978-0-14-312140-4
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    May 29, 2012
  • Alien vs. Predator
    Alien vs. Predator
    Michael Robbins
    978-0-14-312035-3
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    Mar 27, 2012
  • The Middle Ages
    The Middle Ages
    Roger Fanning
    978-1-101-57725-7
    $9.99 US
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    Mar 27, 2012
  • Terroir
    Terroir
    Robert Morgan
    978-1-101-55263-6
    $14.99 US
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    Sep 27, 2011
  • Absentia
    Absentia
    William Stobb
    978-1-101-55269-8
    $14.99 US
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    Sep 27, 2011
  • Twin Cities
    Twin Cities
    Carol Muske-Dukes
    978-0-14-311964-7
    $18.00 US
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    May 31, 2011
  • The Lifting Dress
    The Lifting Dress
    Lauren Berry
    978-1-101-52876-1
    $13.99 US
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    May 31, 2011
  • The Broken Word
    The Broken Word
    An Epic Poem of the British Empire in Kenya, and the Mau Mau Uprising Against It
    Adam Foulds
    978-0-14-311809-1
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 29, 2011
  • Culture of One
    Culture of One
    Alice Notley
    978-0-14-311893-0
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 29, 2011
  • Beautiful Country
    Beautiful Country
    Robert Wrigley
    978-0-14-311837-4
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 28, 2010
  • Callings
    Callings
    Carl Dennis
    978-1-101-46236-2
    $14.99 US
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    Sep 28, 2010
  • Burn Lake
    Burn Lake
    Carrie Fountain
    978-0-14-311771-1
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    May 25, 2010
  • Raptus
    Raptus
    Joanna Klink
    978-0-14-311772-8
    $20.00 US
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    May 25, 2010
  • Lighthead
    Lighthead
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    Terrance Hayes
    978-0-14-311696-7
    $19.00 US
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    Mar 30, 2010
  • The Last Skin
    The Last Skin
    Barbara Ras
    978-0-14-311697-4
    $20.00 US
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    Mar 30, 2010
  • Dearest Creature
    Dearest Creature
    Amy Gerstler
    978-0-14-311635-6
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 29, 2009
  • Rope
    Rope
    Alison Hawthorne Deming
    978-0-14-311636-3
    $20.00 US
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    Sep 29, 2009
  • Mixology
    Mixology
    Adrian Matejka
    978-0-14-311583-0
    $18.00 US
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    May 26, 2009
  • The History of Forgetting
    The History of Forgetting
    Lawrence Raab
    978-1-101-05718-6
    $13.99 US
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    May 26, 2009
  • Or to Begin Again
    Or to Begin Again
    Ann Lauterbach
    978-0-14-311520-5
    $20.00 US
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    Apr 28, 2009
  • Manatee/Humanity
    Manatee/Humanity
    Anne Waldman
    978-0-14-311521-2
    $20.00 US
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    Apr 07, 2009
  • Installations
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    Joe Bonomo
    978-1-4406-3258-7
    $11.99 US
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    Jul 01, 2008
  • May Day
    May Day
    Phillis Levin
    978-0-14-311394-2
    $16.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Apr 29, 2008
  • The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine
    The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine
    Mark Yakich
    978-0-14-311333-1
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 25, 2008
  • Wayfare
    Wayfare
    Pattiann Rogers
    978-1-101-20220-3
    $14.99 US
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    Mar 25, 2008
  • In the Pines
    In the Pines
    Alice Notley
    978-0-14-311254-9
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Oct 02, 2007
  • Backwards Days
    Backwards Days
    Stuart Dischell
    978-1-4406-1905-2
    $11.99 US
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    Oct 02, 2007
  • Flickering
    Flickering
    Pattiann Rogers
    978-0-14-313766-5
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 04, 2023
  • Door
    Door
    Ann Lauterbach
    978-0-14-313737-5
    $22.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Mar 07, 2023
  • The Symmetry of Fish
    The Symmetry of Fish
    Su Cho
    978-0-14-313725-2
    $18.00 US
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    Oct 11, 2022
  • The Study of Human Life
    The Study of Human Life
    Joshua Bennett
    978-0-14-313682-8
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Sep 20, 2022
  • Golden Ax
    Golden Ax
    Rio Cortez
    978-0-14-313713-9
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Aug 30, 2022
  • O
    O
    Zeina Hashem Beck
    978-0-14-313689-7
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jul 05, 2022
  • The True Account of Myself as a Bird
    The True Account of Myself as a Bird
    Robert Wrigley
    978-0-14-313724-5
    $18.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jun 14, 2022
  • Earthborn
    Earthborn
    Carl Dennis
    978-0-14-313701-6
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Mar 01, 2022
  • All the Flowers Kneeling
    All the Flowers Kneeling
    Paul Tran
    978-0-14-313684-2
    $18.00 US
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    Feb 15, 2022
  • Borderline Fortune
    Borderline Fortune
    Teresa K. Miller
    978-0-14-313681-1
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Oct 05, 2021
  • Mutiny
    Mutiny
    Phillip B. Williams
    978-0-14-313693-4
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Sep 07, 2021
  • Somebody Else Sold the World
    Somebody Else Sold the World
    Adrian Matejka
    978-0-14-313644-6
    $20.00 US
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    Penguin Books
    Jul 06, 2021
  • Walkman
    Walkman
    Michael Robbins
    978-0-14-313490-9
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 01, 2021
  • The Life
    The Life
    Carrie Fountain
    978-0-14-313601-9
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 27, 2021
  • Index of Women
    Index of Women
    Amy Gerstler
    978-0-14-313621-7
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 06, 2021
  • Little Big Bully
    Little Big Bully
    Heid E. Erdrich
    978-0-14-313592-0
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Oct 06, 2020
  • Owed
    Owed
    Joshua Bennett
    978-0-14-313385-8
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Sep 01, 2020
  • The Nightfields
    The Nightfields
    Joanna Klink
    978-0-14-313539-5
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jul 07, 2020
  • Tertulia
    Tertulia
    Vincent Toro
    978-0-14-313534-0
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 02, 2020
  • Lean Against This Late Hour
    Lean Against This Late Hour
    Garous Abdolmalekian
    978-0-14-313493-0
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 14, 2020
  • For the Ride
    For the Ride
    Alice Notley
    978-0-14-313457-2
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Mar 03, 2020
  • Fear of Description
    Fear of Description
    Daniel Poppick
    978-0-14-313438-1
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Oct 01, 2019
  • Forage
    Forage
    Rose McLarney
    978-0-14-313319-3
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Sep 03, 2019
  • Spiritual Exercises
    Spiritual Exercises
    Mark Yakich
    978-0-14-313327-8
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jul 02, 2019
  • Sightseer in This Killing City
    Sightseer in This Killing City
    Eugene Gloria
    978-0-14-313384-1
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 04, 2019
  • The Crazy Bunch
    The Crazy Bunch
    Willie Perdomo
    978-0-14-313269-1
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 02, 2019
  • Dolefully, A Rampart Stands
    Dolefully, A Rampart Stands
    Paige Ackerson-Kiely
    978-0-14-313268-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Feb 05, 2019
  • Museum of the Americas
    Museum of the Americas
    J. Michael Martinez
    978-0-14-313344-5
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Oct 02, 2018
  • Spell
    Spell
    Ann Lauterbach
    978-0-14-313352-0
    $22.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Oct 02, 2018
  • Trickster Feminism
    Trickster Feminism
    Anne Waldman
    978-0-14-313236-3
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jul 03, 2018
  • American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
    American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
    Terrance Hayes
    978-0-14-313318-6
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 19, 2018
  • Blue Rose
    Blue Rose
    Carol Muske-Dukes
    978-0-14-313125-0
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 03, 2018
  • Night School
    Night School
    Carl Dennis
    978-0-14-313235-6
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Apr 03, 2018
  • Rift of Light
    Rift of Light
    William Logan
    978-0-14-313182-3
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Oct 03, 2017
  • Madness
    Madness
    Sam Sax
    978-0-14-313170-0
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Sep 12, 2017
  • In Darwin's Room
    In Darwin's Room
    Debora Greger
    978-0-14-313131-1
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 06, 2017
  • Quickening Fields
    Quickening Fields
    Pattiann Rogers
    978-0-14-313132-8
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 06, 2017
  • Box
    Box
    Robert Wrigley
    978-0-14-313056-7
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Mar 28, 2017
  • Map to the Stars
    Map to the Stars
    Adrian Matejka
    978-0-14-313057-4
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Mar 28, 2017
  • Stairway to Heaven
    Stairway to Heaven
    Poems
    Alison Hawthorne Deming
    978-0-14-310885-6
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Sep 27, 2016
  • The Sobbing School
    The Sobbing School
    Joshua Bennett
    978-0-14-311186-3
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Sep 27, 2016
  • Certain Magical Acts
    Certain Magical Acts
    Alice Notley
    978-0-14-310816-0
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 07, 2016
  • Plenty
    Plenty
    Corinne Lee
    978-0-14-310817-7
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Jun 07, 2016
  • Mr. Memory & Other Poems
    Mr. Memory & Other Poems
    Phillis Levin
    978-0-14-312811-3
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Mar 29, 2016
  • A Woman of Property
    A Woman of Property
    Robyn Schiff
    978-0-14-312827-4
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Mar 08, 2016
  • Viability
    Viability
    Sarah Vap
    978-0-698-40735-0
    $9.99 US
    Ebook
    Penguin Books
    Jan 26, 2016
  • It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful
    It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful
    Lia Purpura
    978-0-14-312690-4
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Sep 29, 2015
  • Scattered at Sea
    Scattered at Sea
    Amy Gerstler
    978-0-14-312689-8
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    May 26, 2015
  • Dark Energy
    Dark Energy
    Poems
    Robert Morgan
    978-0-14-312806-9
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    May 26, 2015
  • Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy
    Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy
    Joanna Klink
    978-0-14-312687-4
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
    Mar 31, 2015
  • How to Be Drawn
    How to Be Drawn
    Terrance Hayes
    978-0-14-312688-1
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Penguin Books
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