Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Books
Oct.24.2012
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's first book since Poetry as Insurgent Art, a new call to action and a vivid picture of civilization moving towards its brink.
New Directions is proud to announce a riveting and galvanizing new book by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. At ninety-three, he shows more power than most any other poet at work today. Ferlinghetti describes his new book, Time of Useful...
Apr.17.2008
A million copies in print-translated into over a dozen languages-one of the best-selling and most popular books of poetry ever published, now available in a new hardcover edition containing a CD of the author reading his work. Ferlinghetti is a national treasure, and his voice has become part of our collective conscience. Some of his most famous poems from this...
Sep.01.2007
From the groundbreaking (and betselling) A Coney Island of the Mind in 1958 to the “personal epic” of Americus, Book I in 2003, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has, in more than 30 books, been the poetic conscience of America. Now in Poetry As Insurgent Art, he offers, in prose, his primer of what poetry is, could be, should be.
The result is by turns tender and furious, personal and...
Apr.01.2004
Describing Americus as “part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epic—a descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political,” Ferlinghetti combines “universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem, the...
Jan.01.2004
Close to 100 figurative drawings in black and white, and in color, mostly nudes in love or strife, some “disastered by life,” some with incisive or caustic words integrated in the images. This is a retrospective of Ferlinghetti’s graphic work and play, ranging from his early drawings made in Paris ateliers, to yesterday’s sessions sketching models in his San Francisco studio.
May.01.2002
Here are all of Ferlinghetti’s poems set in the city he has lived in for more than half a century. He brings alive, with wit and lyricism, scenes of city life: a Giants baseball game, the Green Street Marching Mortuary Band, bohemian North Beach, Golden Gate Park, yachts on the Bay, and more. Also included are historic photographs, scattered prose pieces, and the text of his...
Oct.01.2001
“The more I make love, the more I want revolution; the more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.” In Paris, in May of 1968, revolution, and love are very much in the air. The barricades are going up, the students of the Sorbonne are taking to streets alive with the graffiti of revolt, and the Odeon is ablaze with speechmaking.
For Annie, a young American painter, and...
Jun.01.2001
This collection of recent poems is graced with a short introduction by the poet in which he says, “All I ever wanted to do was to paint light on the walls of life.” For more than 50 years Ferlinghetti has been doing just that—illuminating both the everyday and the unusual, all the while keeping true to his original dictum of speaking in a way accessible to everyone. He has been,...
Apr.01.2001
A reissue of Ferlinghetti’s very short experimental plays (1965) with three new plays added to the original thirteen. In this collection Ferlinghetti takes a revolutionary look at modern theater and explores the area between old-style drama and spontaneous improvisation by supplying a blueprint for dramatic action—an outline from which director and actors may create and interpret...
Sep.01.1998
An insightful and stunning collection of photographs of the Beat poet. Includes Ferlinghetti's beloved poem “Autobiography.”
Sep.01.1998
A sequel to A Coney Island of the Mind (written forty years after the original in what the author has called “a poetry seizure” that lasted more than a year), A Far Rockaway of the Heart is a sequence of 101 related poems with recurrent themes. The author also thinks of it as a kind of caustic critique of modern poetry, including confrontations with or parodies of major figures in...
Oct.01.1997
The Cool Eye contains texts from two interviews (including two poems read by the author), and two new poems published here for the first time, as well as a cover painting by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Jan.01.1995
Published to celebrate forty years of City Lights publishing, which began with the letterpress printing of this book in 1955.
It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's first book, and it has been reprinted twenty-one times, having never been out of print. The original edition contained the first twenty-seven poems to which the author has now added eighteen new verses.
Dec.01.1994
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of our ageless radicals and truebards, has gathered four decades of poetry in his inimitable everyman’s voice, including more than fifty pages of new work.
Dec.01.1988
Wild Dreams of a New Beginning brings together two acclaimed poetry volumes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of our “ageless radicals and true bards” (Booklist). Who Are We Now? (1976), the first half of Wild Dreams, takes a long poetic look at the cultural fallout of a more radical time. This probing of the changes in the American psyche through the 1970s is carried forward in the...
About Lawrence
A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues, Ferlinghetti’s...