Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club Poems: 1975-1990

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 byThe Times(London) for the "vision and confident skill to make American poetry new"--has selected the best of the poems collected inStorm over Hackensack(1985) andEarthquake Weather(1989) and added an autobiographical Preface. August Kleinzahlerwas born in Jersey City in 1949. He is the author of ten books of poems and a memoir,Cutty, One Rock.His most recent book of poetry,The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize. He won the Lannan Literary Award in 2008. He lives in San Francisco. "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" Though Kleinzahler's first collections earned him a cult following, they have long been out of print or hard to find. ForLive from the Hong Kong Nile Club, Kleinzahlercredited byThe Times(London) with the "vision and confident skill to make American poetry new"has chosen the best ofStorm over Hackensack,Earthquake Weather, and other volumes. Featuring a new autobiographical preface, this collection makes available the early work of a contemporary master. "[Kleinzahler's] world is one of inundating multiplicity, noise, hubbub, traffic, crowds--a federation of intense and disparate states unified in a single sensibility. . . . Kleinzahler's concern with getting it exactly right is also Pound's, and his best successes here are just as crisp and pungent as Pound's most startling images."DeSales Harrison,Boston Book Review "Kleinzahler's verse line is always precise, concrete, intelligent, and rarethat quality of 'chiseled' verse memorable in Basil Bunting's and Erza Pound's work. A loner, a genius."Allen Ginsberg "August Kleinzahler is surely one of the best lyric poets writing today . . . A typical piece is fleeting, unstable, almost improvisatory, entirely seductive in its aimlessness."Stephen Knight,Times Literary Supplement

August Kleinzahler's most recent collections are Green Sees Things in Waves (FSG, 1998) and Red Sauce, Whiskey and Snow (FSG, 1995). He lives in San Francisco, where he writes a music column for The San Diego Weekly Reader.