“Ravaged by the random sufferings of the American street and warmed by the casual glance of Eros, cool in its quiet truth to consciousness and wild in its classic command of poetic phrases and tuning, this is work that echoes an unlikely range of American songsmiths from Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker to T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane.”
—Tom Clark, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“Bob Kaufman’s life as a poet is unique to American literature. He kept no diary or journal, published no literary essays, wrote no reviews, and maintained no correspondences. . . . Yet the various schools of American poetry have sung his praises. Recognized early on as a major figure in the Beat Generation of writers and poets, Kaufman is also known as one of America’s true surrealist poets, a premier jazz poet, and a major poet of the black consciousness movement. So much did he embody a French tradition of the poet as outsider, madman, and outcast, that in France, Kaufman was called the Black Rimbaud.”
—David Henderson, from the introduction
