Time of Useful Consciousness Signed Edition

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 Consciousness, as “a fragmented recording of the American stream-of-consciousness, always westward streaming; a people’s poetic history in the tradition of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, Charles Olson’s Maximus, Allen Ginsberg’s Fall of America, and Ed Sanders’ America: a History in Verse. ‘Time of Useful Consciousness, is an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time in which some life-saving action is possible.”Ferlinghetti’s first book since Poetry as Insurgent Art, the fierce and immediate Time of Useful Consciousness presents poetry written “in ways that those who see poetry as the province of the few and educated had never imagined” (The New York Times Book Review).

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.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. After receiving an A.B. degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a stint in the Navy during World War II, and after working in the mail room at Time Magazine and living in Paris where he received a Doctorat de l'Universite from the Sorbonne, Ferlinghetti eventually settled in San Francisco, where he and Peter D. Martin founded the first all-paperback bookstore in the country, City Lights Books. Besides being named San Francisco's first poet laureate, he has received The Before Columbus Foundation "Lifetime Achievement Award." Most recently he has also been writing a weekly column, "Poetry as News," for the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.