From The Boston Review
Inventory opens with "Scattered Vignettes," a raw, hallucinatory work about Lima's mythopoetic origins. The poem records a striking mosaic of abuses at the hands of parents, priests, and various controlled substances. But such stories are not the key to this book. "Poetry," after all, "is pinker / than nature," and the past matters less here than the present and future: "every day is a new instrument." That is, he's got work to do. Instead of holding up a mirror to life, Lima holds up "fingers popping with eyes." These poems don't make sense--nor love--so much as they make for love through the senses. Although love is his great subject, some of Lima's traditional love poems drift lazily into flat cliché. His most wondrous feats are object poems such as "Geranium" and "The Hand"--expansive empathies that suggest a sensually surreal George Herbert. It's here that we taste "the terrible flavor of love." For Lima, a working chef and former New York School bad boy, "Poetry is an expressive cut of meat." So we do sit and eat. Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved.

Kenneth Koch
"The shock I get from reading them is...from seeing something new in the way of art."

Allen Ginsberg
“One decade of Suffering City Withdrawal Pains is focused here in the few poems a young man finds in his head..."

Donald Barthelme
“Frank Lima writes poems which...tell you things you know and things you do not know, and are entirely beautiful.”

Book Description
large collection of New York School poet

About the Author
Frank Lima was born in New York City in "Spanish Harlem," 1939. His parents were Mexican/Puerto Rican. After a troubled youth of sexual abuse, gangs, drug abuse, and its consequences, he began studying poetry, having been influenced by Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell and Pablo Neruda. He would later go on to receive a Masters from Columbia University and become a significant voice in the New York City poetry scene in the ‘60s along with his teachers Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. In the ‘70s Lima dropped out of the poetry world (although he would continue to write) to devote his time to his family and pursue a career in the food services industry, as he was "classically trained," in his youth, in classical French Cooking. He is now a teacher at the New York Restaurant School where he teaches culinary arts.

Excerpted from Inventory : New and Selected Poems (Profile Series) by Frank Lima, David Shapiro. Copyright © 1997. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
94’ Puerto Rican Day Parade June 19, 1994 Spring is on the lips of the mannequins The bars are filled with women Who are writing the history of bullets On empty photographs of Puerto Rico With loud music that tells me I do not exist I’m the floor of the parade you once walked upon The warehouse of wishes where you stored The accessories of my childhood They are attached to me Like a small hand following a planet Like a kiss following you in the dark Are the police keeping my promises to you? Are the beggars in the subway offering you my poems? When my grandmother died At the center of faith and life Where she kept the encyclopedia Of ammonia and anger My grandfather recited The story of sex But she would not stay awake He was as bright as candy As he sang to the ice on her lips. Bread & Water June 30, 1995 What good am I if I’m not a fish? A loaf of bread? Are my lips made of bullets? The day has lost its faucet Its grip on life I rinse my mouth with your daily morning Because you are the spatula Used to create windows The clouds in the hospitals On your submarine white skin Like lungs dreaming of veiny gas Against the drops of night Ignition Is where aeriferous shame Falls on noisy streets Incomplete without your hideouts Your softness has a thousand legs There was sleep before life Strangers came with cars before God With their maps of Eskimos And their tombs of passion From the whale’s room Women are rivers that water children They are the ropes of their fathers Like the passion in the desert They die in their father’s hands They are the ants of Israel Is it only souls that can become bees? There are trillions of them without wings Like rags between your mother’s prayers Beloved balm of her placenta The whisper of cakes to me Ancient wife to all my fingers My Venus fleeting seconds You are my daily loss I am the kiss banging at your door You are keys I have lost.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This new collection of poetry by Frank Lima is a genuine literary event. The first book publication in twenty years by this respected student of Frank O'Hara and member of the "New York School" is a mix of one-third selected poems from his long-out-of-print publications and two-thirds the best of his unpublished or previously, uncollected work from the last two decades.