What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

by Charles Bukowski

The inexhaustibly prolific Bukowski issues books even from beyond the grave, as is the case with this, his second posthumous volume. As ever, he is caustically self-focused, examining the trivialities of his life and those of others such as Henry Miller and Katherine Hepburn.

Editions of What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

	ISBN 9781574231052	Binding/Format Paperback	Publisher Harpercollins	Date 1999	Price $8.38	Very Good
	ISBN 9781574231069	Binding/Format Hardcover	Publisher Harpercollins	Date 1999	Price $76.00	Fine

Publisher Notes

Charles Bukowski's gamble in art was as prolific as it was audacious. The second in Black Sparrow's series of posthumous volumes of Bukowski's poetry takes us deeper into the raw, wild vein that extends from the early 1970s to the 1990s. As in Bone Palace Ballet (1997), Buk here observes the world with an "unadorned self-awareness" (Publishers Weekly) that makes each poem "a little nugget of roughneck-intellectual autobiography or attitude" (Booklist). The courage, candor, humor and human understanding of Bukowski's poetry commingle to create a kind of intuitive contact and gut wisdom not found in Western verse since Francois Villon. it's a farce, the great actors, the great poets, the great statesmen, the great painters, the great composers, the great loves, it's a farce, a farce, a farce, history and the recording of it, forget it, forget it. you must begin all over again. throw all that out. all of them out you are alone with now. look at your fingernails. touch your nose. begin. the day flings itself upon you.

Media Reviews

"[T]his collection gathers a good deal of tossed-off fertilizer along with the blooms. But it stands in spite of this--or perhaps because of it?--as a testament to outward sloth and a fierce, inverted work ethic, a belief in self-help through unending self-attention, a refusal to waste even the smallest table scrap of world or time."

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