Essential meanings are often missed. As a straight male who thinks of myself as a feminist I not infrequently found myself in the role of Bukowski apologist, advising people not to judge him for the stuff they didn’t like, or to look at the method not the content, or don’t judge a book by its critics. The fact is Neeli Cherkovski was openly gay and Bukowski had always supported him in this, saying, “It’s great that you guys have each other,” when he married his partner Jesus Cabrera years ago. This book’s beauty is of such a quality it can’t be captured on film and has to be seen to be believed—its cover a black and white photo on a reflective silver-gray background, with the title and author’s name overlaid and exactly centered in dignified letters of slightly brighter silver. This silvery limousine of a book is a culmination of Neeli’s long career living for poetry and represents his long-past-overdue canonization as Genius Bard. Every poem in it is a precious digest of humorous, haunted words, historic photos interspersed in black and white. An introduction by Charles Bernstein is followed by a picture of the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti (whose biography Neeli wrote) showing something to a bearded, thirty-ish version of the author followed by another picture of an even younger unshaven version of himself sitting on a tricycle next to Bukowski on another trike somewhere in Los Angeles.
My review of his Collected Poems at Rain Taxi Review is HERE
