Little Boy

March 1, 2019
On the eve of his 100th birthday, renowned poet Ferlinghetti delivers an enigmatic work that serves as a fitting coda to a long and productive career, even as it emphatically resists anything resembling resolution or conclusion. Early passages, sketching an underloved boy bounced among relatives in the New York suburbs, suggest autobiography, just as glimpses of an old man writing in an existentialist caf� on the left coast of this country, watching reality pass by with a wild eye imply memoir. Neither is accurate. Forty pages in, Ferlinghetti has opened up the stream-of-consciousness throttle and dialed back the punctuation, and we find ourselves flooded with language, splashing among free-associative verse, literary references, end-times lamentations, sensual (and sexual) celebrations, political jabs, and more than a few groanworthy puns. There's always another thought to be spoken or written and we can't go on but I do, declares Ferlinghetti. And that may be the point of this dissonant, bewildering, intermittently beautiful book: the end can be kept at bay so long as one can keep pushing out whirlwinds of words.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2018

It's called fiction, but this interweave of autobiography and history, lightning-flash language and wisdom of the ages by Ferlinghetti--author of the million-copy-selling poetry collection A Coney Island of the Mind and owner of the bookstore City Lights, whose publication of Allen Ginsberg's Howl caused First Amendment upheaval--is beyond easy definition. Published in time for Ferlinghetti's 100th birthday and sold by Ferlinghetti's longtime agent, 97-year-old Sterling Lord.

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