Essential poems by the late New York poet.
Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry.
Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings the eternal questions of life, co-existence and depth, while never forgetting to eat Lunch is favorite meal...
"O'Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few books of his era show less age."―Dwight Garner, New York Times
"As collections go, none brings . . . quality to the fore more than the thirty-seven Lunch Poems, published in 1964 by City Lights."―Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review
"What O'Hara is getting at is a sense of the evanescence, and the power, of great art, that inextricable contradiction ― that what makes it moving and transcendent is precisely our knowledge that it will pass away. This is the ethos at the center of Lunch Poems: not the informal or the conversational for their own sake but rather in the service of something more intentional, more connective, more engaged." ―David L. Ulin, Los Angeles TImes
"The collection broadcasts snark, exuberance, lonely earnestness, and minute-by-minute autobiography to a wide, vague audience―much like today's Twitter and Facebook feeds."―Micah Mattix, The Atlantic
"Sweet poems, funny, exhilarating, spontaneous, subversive, poignant, and sometimes―often―more deeply, even darkly moving. But above all sweet. Probably a greater proportion of O’Hara’s poems can be read for sheer pleasure than the poems of any other 20th-century writer. This slim volume is his liveliest, most distilled and delectable single collection. Quintessential O’Hara, and such a bargain!"―Lloyd Schwartz, Grolier Poetry Book Shop
