On Love

• Literary Collections / Letters

“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author

"He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter

A companion to On Writing and On Cats: Charles Bukowski's On Love is a raw and tender poetry collection that captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable—on a subject that hits home with all of us.

Charles Bukowski was a man of intense emotions, someone an editor once called a “passionate madman.” In On Love, we see Bukowski reckoning with the complications and exaltations of love, lust, and desire. Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love—its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power.

Bukowski is brilliant on love—often amusing, sometimes playful, and fleetingly sweet. On Love offers deep insight into Bukowski the man and the artist; whether writing about his daughter, his lover, his friends, or his work, he is piercingly honest and poignantly reflective, using love as a prism to see the world in all its beauty and cruelty, and his own fragile place in it. “My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough,” he writes, “as the same cat crouches.”

Brutally honest, flecked with humor and pathos, On Love reveals Bukowski at his most candid and affecting.