(Kleinzahler, August) August Kleinzahler is the author of eleven books of poems, including Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, which won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. He is also the author of the memoir, Cutty, One Rock. Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs: Selected Prose, 2000-2016 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) gathers the best of sixteen years’ worth of essays, remembrances, and reviews in this scabrous and essential collection, setting down his thoughts about great poets and bad poets, about kvetching fiction writers and homicidal musicians, about eccentric critics and discerning nobodies—always with insight and humor. When Kleinzahler won the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, the judges’ citation referred to his work as “ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers.” They might also have added “between New Jersey and San Francisco,” the places Kleinzahler has spent his life traveling between, both on the road and on the page. Now, Before Dawn on Bluff Road (New Jersey) and Hollyhocks in the Fog (San Francisco) (Macmillan) assembles the best of his New Jersey and San Francisco poems for the first time, organized according to place, with each city receiving its own title and cover. The collection function as both word-maps and word-anatomies of one of our greatest poet’s lifelong passions and preoccupations.
