From Booklist
Bukowski's posthumous productivity continues, this time giving us one of his best collections, thanks for which are perhaps due to the editorial labors of John Martin, who closed down his long-running Black Sparrow Press a few years back but maintained his interest in his meat-and-potatoes author. Like many another Buk collection, this one comes in four parts. To see just how good it is, turn to part 2, indicatively introduced by these lines: "There's a lioness / down the hallway // put on your lion's mask / and wait." The section's theme is women: Buk's women, lioness-like, indeed. Approach with caution or, better, as he says, wait. Beauty or, like Buk, beast, each is as sexy, feisty, crude, and smart (sometimes) as he is. These seemingly artless (you try to write anything good in Bukowski's dribble-down-the-page free style) rants, matched here in force and humor by the ones not about women, are the poetic analogs of the man-woman stuff in the pages of tough-guy novelists from Spillane and Thompson^B to Leonard. Ray Olson
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Book Description

Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother in 1920, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944 when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp (1994).

During his lifetime Bukowski published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including the novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982), and Hollywood (1989). Among his most recent books are the posthumous editions of What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire: New Poems (1999), Open All Night: New Poems (2000), The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps: New Poems (2001), Sifting through the madness for the Word, the line, the way: New Poems (2003), and The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain: New Poems (2004).

All of his books have now been published in translation in more than a dozen languages, and his worldwide popularity remains undiminished. In the years to come Ecco will publish additional volumes of previously uncollected poetry and prose.

FROM THE PUBLISHER