Beauti-Ful

Charles Bukowski

Wormwood review puts out lovely single-author collections as issues of the magazine every once in a while. This is the second I've come across (the first being Lyn Lifshin's Parade, and in all honesty I could probably cut large sections of the Lifshin review and paste them into this one without needing to change anything. The two books are almost identical; solidly-constructed limited-edition chapbooks on paper of somewhat surprising quality, with decent, if not consistently excellent, work from each of the authors represented. The name of the collection is something of a misnomer; I was expecting these forty-seven pages to contain three, maybe four, pieces. The poems may be slightly longer than the Bukowski norm (there's nothing here that fits on a single page), but nothing you can't find a good number of examples of, lengthwise, in any big collection since *Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame*. The average quality of the pieces themselves is good, but there are few surprises (and you've likely seen a number of these in other collections since; "Number 2 Pencil," especially, stands out). With the current cost of out-of-print Bukowskis (as I write this, the cheapest one to be found on Amazon is going for $89.25; you can find one at bookfinder.com for $40), only collectors are going to want to go after this one right now. You can wait till the market dies down or, if you've got a pretty comprehensive selection of the books he released on Black Sparrow between 1987 and 1994, you've likely got almost all of these pieces anyway.