MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksNot many people will say this, but Bukowski gives drinking a bad name ... Unlike his pen pal Henry Miller, he never displays much self-awareness or insight, and when he tries, it’s muddled ... Quotes...from On Drinking are...samples of Bukowski’s dead-end philosophy, which apparently was not just a literary pose ... Bukowski liked to emphasize \'the line that startles\' as his goal in writing a poem, and he did indeed write some genuinely great, startling poems, especially early on. The problem, though, is how often his choice of words can tend toward the tone-deaf, just enough off the mark to miss the point of impact. And some are way off ... The booze-themed poems chosen for On Drinking read a lot like the booze-themed prose pieces included right next to them, and here I can’t help but think of the words of another prolific substance abuser, the Beats’ mentor William Burroughs: \'From my way of thinking, many poets are simply lazy prose writers.\' It’s Bukowski’s novels that anchor his reputation and justify the absurd amount of attention he gets as a poet ... See if you don’t agree: many of the shorter poems here read like jocular cast-off notes-to-self ... Be warned that On Drinking will contain the words \'beer\' and \'vomit\' (in close proximity) on pretty much every page. And forgive me for quoting Bill Burroughs one more time in relation to Bukowski’s endlessly reworked obsessions: \'When people start talking about their bowel movements they are as inexorable as the processes of which they speak.\'
David Kipen
PositiveLos Angeles Review of Books\"Maybe the biggest surprise to be found in Dear Los Angeles is that the giant whales of 20th-century literature — Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Hemingway, and e. e. cummings — are all here ... Many readers of this little roller-coaster (or rolodex?) of a book will go to the index to hunt for a favorite name, and many will come away disappointed that somebody they wanted to find is missing ... Speaking of things left out, one is surprised to find not even one angry journal entry or panicked telegram (from, say, a mother to a soldier) in response to the existential shock of Pearl Harbor, which happened on December 7, 1941. Everyone felt Los Angeles was the next target. This is quite an omission, and while it might be in tune with Kipen’s more or less \'pacific\' mood, it will no doubt puzzle many history-minded readers ... Is Kipen’s calendar method some kind of Nietzschean, Viconian, Spenglerian eternal recurrence device?... The answer is no, but it does give Dear Los Angeles a strangely \'living\' quality. The jumpy effect of these voices and moods in such strange proximity to each other, across centuries, creates the sense of a vibrant community — of creators, searchers, thinkers, explorers, leaders, and a few lost souls — engaged in constant conversation ... [a] good-looking and compact keepsake of a book. It’s the Southland’s diary, and a book for the ages.\
