Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

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

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

Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame is poetry full of gambling, drinking and women. Charles Bukowski writes realistically about the seedy underbelly of life.

From the horse track to the flophouse, these are dispatches from the edge.

Gritty Poetry: Raw, unflinching, and darkly funny poems that find beauty and despair in the mundane world of dive bars, dead-end jobs, and tenement rooms. Working-Class Literature: A voice for the marginalized, capturing the exhaustion and small, defiant pleasures of life on the clock and on the bum. The Los Angeles Underground: Experience the sun-bleached, unforgiving streets of a forgotten L.A., a world away from the glitz of Hollywood. Unvarnished Honesty: Bukowski lays it all bare—the gambling, the drinking, the messy relationships with women, and the struggle to create in a world that doesn’t care.