Flirting with Dissolution 

Mark Ford

The poems in Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club are taken from August Kleinzahler’s first six publications. All were small press books with relatively limited circulations – the first, The Sausage Master of Minsk (1977), was hand-set by the publishers and the poet himself on a platen press in Montreal. Until the early 1990s, when he was taken on by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Faber in Britain, Kleinzahler’s work was not much known beyond the alternative poetry world, and in a postscript to this selection, written at an airport hotel in Phoenix, he ponders his transition from the shadows to the bright lights of the professional poetry scene:

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