The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia represents the lifework of the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation. Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) played a major role in shaping the poetics of both the Beat and the Surrealist movements in the United States. First mentored by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, the teenage Lamantia also came to the attention of the French Surrealist leader André Breton, who, after reading Lamantia’s youthful work, hailed him as a “voice that rises once in a hundred years.” Later, Lamantia went “on the road” with Jack Kerouac and shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, where Ginsburg first read “Howl.” Throughout his life, Lamantia sought to extend and renew the visionary tradition of Romanticism in a distinctly American vernacular, drawing on mystical lore and drug experience in the process. The Collected Poems gathers not only his published work but also an extensive selection of unpublished or uncollected work; the editors have also provided a biographical introduction.

"A selection of prose writing from American poet Philip Lamantia (1927-2005), edited by poet Garrett Caples"--

The original American surrealist returns in a new edition of the 1967 classic. "I am eager to do a book of yours," Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote to Philip Lamantia in Nerja, Spain in 1966. "What about SELECTED POEMS OF PHILIP LAMANTIA?" The missive came at the right time, as Lamantia had recently reembraced the surrealism of his youth and sought to publish his current work alongside his key poems of the 1940s, when the then-15-year-old poet was published by war-exiled leader of the Surrealist Movement, André Breton. For Breton, the young poet was a new Rimbaud, but Lamantia also became known as a poet of the Beat Generation, participating in the 1955 Six Gallery Reading where Allen Ginsberg debuted "Howl." A pioneer of San Francisco's psychedelic culture, Lamantia reemerged through City Lights at the crest of the Summer of Love. Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia reflects each facet of the poet's development up to the point of its publication. "Revelations of a Surreal Youth (1943-1945)" includes the incendiary poems from his teenage years which brought him early avant-garde fame, including his signature "Touch of the Marvelous." "Trance Ports (1948-1961)" covers the Beat years, evincing increasing involvement with mysticism, esoterism, and religion. Finally, "Secret Freedom (1963-1966)" heralds his return to surrealism, cementing his countercultural bona fides with the LSD-fueled "Blue Grace," the zig-zagging Kundalini-inspired "What Is Not Strange?" and the Aquarian Age ode "Astro-Mancy," which prefigures his later engagement with Native American culture. This new edition includes an afterword by poet and editor Garrett Caples, recounting the book's genesis through correspondence between Lamantia and Ferlinghetti and including archival images. A much-needed restoration to the Pocket Poets Series of today, Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia glows like a red-hot coal still burning with the revolutionary fervor of its time.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the California Book Award in Poetry Three kinetically distilled long poems by the singular American poet who “transfigures ‘thought’ into a weave of lexical magic” (Philip Lamantia) “The poet is endemic with life itself,” Will Alexander once said, and in this searing pas de trois, Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten, he has exemplified this vital candescence with a transpersonal amplification worthy of the Cambrian explosion. “This being the ballet of the forgotten,” he writes as diasporic witness, “of refracted boundary points as venom.” The volume’s opening poem pays homage to the innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author Amos Tutuola; it ends with an encomium to the modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo—two writers whose luminous art suffered “colonial wrath through refraction.” A tribute to the Congo forms the bridge and brisé vole of the book: the Congo as “charged aural colony” and “primal interconnection,” a “subliminal psychic force” with a colonial and postcolonial history dominated by the Occident. Will Alexander’s improvisatory cosmicity pushes poetic language to the point of most resistance—incantatory and swirling with magical laterality and recovery.