The great story of New York City in the past half-century has been its near collapse and miraculous rebirth. A battered town left for dead, one that almost a million people abandoned and where those who remained had to live behind triple deadbolt locks, was reinvigorated by the twinned energies of starving artists and financial white knights. Over the next generation, the city was utterly transformed. It again became the capital of wealth and innovation,...

Poems rising from and returning to Bukowski's personal experiences reflect people, objects, places, and events of the external world, and reflects on them, on their way out and back.