August Kleinzahler’s collections include Green Sees Things in Waves; The Strange Hours Travellers Keep, which won the Griffin Poetry Prize; Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hotel Oneira and Snow Approaching on the Hudson. His memoir of his childhood in New Jersey, Cutty, One Rock, came out in 2005. Much of it first appeared in the LRB, as did many of the pieces included in Sallies, Romps, Portraits and Send-Offs: Selected Prose 2000-2016.
Barack Obama, junior senator from Illinois and presidential candidate, passed through San Francisco last month during a three-day visit to California, the climax of which was an ‘exclusive’ fund-raiser at Oprah Winfrey’s estate in Santa Barbara County, expected to raise around $3.5 million. Winfrey is a good friend to have, whether you’re moving depilatories, novels or...
You’d figure the hawk for an isolate thing, commanding the empyrean, taking his ease in the thermals and wind until that retinal flick, the plunge and shriek – cruelly perfect at what he is. With crepe myrtle igniting the streets and flowering pansy underfoot I’d get out there just after dawn each day, before the sun made it over the mesquite and honey locust. Cliff swallows...
On a 700-foot-thick shelf of Cretaceous pink sandstoneNel mezzo … Sixth floor, turn right at the elevator ‘The hotel of the century’Elegant dining, dancing, solarium Around the block from the Black Hills School of Beauty And campaign headquarters of one Jack Billion (‘Together we can move forward’) The exact centre of the Oglala known universeCante wamakoguake...
Animalcules heave their tackling, ladders of polysaccharides, onto meatmilkshrimp&creamy emulsions,
sticking like putrefactive velcro. The refrigerator switches on in the darkness, a murmuring, perfervid sadhu close at hand.
Turbidity, gases, a silky clouding over – gray slime spreads across hot dog casings, a sour reechiness transpires below.
However much by day we...
The bicycle paths of this Social Democracy are busy with pedallers, humourless and good, speeding down their privileged corridors, kinetic emblems of an enlightened state, efficient, compassionate, and on the go.
Our visitor shuffles to the fine arts museum and sits there, mildly hungover, before the Delvaux, not one of his best, as if that really mattered,...
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,...
In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’: What was said by Marx, boys, what did he...
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