The first broad retrospective of August Kleinzahler's career, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City gathers poems from his major works along with a rich portion of new poems that visit different voice registers, experiment with form and length, and confirm Kleinzahler as among the most inventive and brilliant poets of our time. Travel--actual and imaginary--remains a passion and inspiration, and in these pages the poet also finds This sanctified ground / Here, yes, here / The dead solid center of the universe / At the heart of the heart of America. August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City in 1949. He is the author of ten books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. His most recent book of poetry, The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize. He lives in San Francisco. A National Book Critics Circle Award FinalistA Northern California Book Award Finalist

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book

A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book of the Year

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

The first broad retrospective of August Kleinzahler's career, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City gathers poems from his major works along with a rich portion of new poems. Within this collection, Kleinzahler visits different voice registers, experiments with form and length, and confirms his writing among the most inventive of his time. Travel--actual and imaginary--remains a passion and inspiration, and in these pages the poet also finds This sanctified ground / Here, yes, here / The dead solid center of the universe / At the heart of the heart of America. Many poets try to sound tough, or masculine, or self-conscious about manhood, and fail miserably: what qualities let Kleinzahler succeed? His eye, and his ear--he is, first and last, a craftsman, a maker of lines--but also his range of tones, and his self-restraint: he never says more than he should, rarely repeats himself and keeps his focus not on the man who speaks the poems (and whose personality comes across anyway) but on what that man sees and on what he can hear.--Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review Many poets try to sound tough, or masculine, or self-conscious about manhood, and fail miserably: what qualities let Kleinzahler succeed? His eye, and his ear--he is, first and last, a craftsman, a maker of lines--but also his range of tones, and his self-restraint: he never says more than he should, rarely repeats himself and keeps his focus not on the man who speaks the poems (and whose personality comes across anyway) but on what that man sees and on what he can hear.--Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review

Sleeping It Off in Rapid City features on its cover a nighttime photograph of a White Castle hamburger franchise. Like White Castle's pint-size hamburgers, Mr. Kleinzahler's poems are of uncertain if not dubious nutritional value. And while there is nothing made-to-order about them, his poems arrive salty and hot; you'll want to devour them on your lap, with a stack of napkins to mop up the grease. Mr. Kleinzahler is an American eccentric, a hard man to pin down. Born in New Jersey, he writes poems that have a pushy exuberance and an expert recall of that state's tougher schoolyards--of bullies with names like Stinky Phil and of 'fire trucks and galoshes, / the taste of pencils and Louis Bocca's ear.' And he writes with elegiac insight about life's losers, the people he calls 'strange rangers, ' the addicted, insane or destitute . . . Mr. Kleinzahler, who has lived for several decades in San Francisco, writes most often in a strongly accented free verse that is among the most articulate and alive sounds American poetry is currently making. He plays effortlessly with forms, voices, registers. And his range of cultural reference--from Catullus to Custer, from Lorca to Eric Dolphy--is wide and artfully deployed. Rarely does high, learned poetic art sound this casual. As 'Sleeping It Off in Rapid City' demonstrates, you can find in Mr. Kleinzahler's verse echoes of poets as disparate as Frank O'Hara (the appraising eye and metropolitan ease), Jim Harrison (the life-affirming appetites), Tony Hoagland (the deft grasp of high culture and low) and Charles Simic (a certain satirical angularity, and attention paid to food and drink and their sorrows and delights). It's easy to troll through any of Mr. Kleinzahler's books and pick out fresh, alert observations. (Flipping almost at random through this one I find: 'Say, who among us does not care to be undressed?' and 'If butter can't cure what ails you, / no cure is there to be found.') But beneath their surface charms, the reverberating subjects of nearly all of Mr. Kleinzahler's poems, particularly his later ones, are brute human longing and loneliness.'--Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Despite its title, there is very little sleeping in this gathering of new and previously published works. What binds these erudite poems is their restlessness. Planes fly overhead ('Red pulse the big jet's lights / in descent'); the poet returns to his childhood home ('No one is left here who knows me anymore'); even food spoiling in the refrigerator ('Fetor of broken proteins') is notable for its implied metamorphosis. Kleinzahler moves easily between casual rowdiness and scholarly composure, often with a sense of humor; a series of poems under the title 'A History of Western Music' mock their own authority. He also employs simplicity and clarity when needed, as in 'Portrait of My Mother in January.' The need for connection is another kind of movement, with the sense of a human being as a country to be travelled to: 'Unvisited I do not live, I endure.'--The New Yorker

In these sprawling, energetic poems, Kleinzahler takes for his subject the detritus of daily life in America--brand names, back highways, celebrities--and the derelict people who live it, which usually is the poet himself schlepping from town to town. Here he finds, with just a touch of comic irony, 'The dead solid center of the universe / At the heart of the heart of America.'--St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Start out with Frank O'Hara (as Kleinzahler himself admits), add the Northumbrian music of Basil Bunting, a lust for women and the tough-guy ironies and rue of noir at its most genuine (his memoir is rather brilliantly titled Cutty, One Rock) and you've got one of the great living poets. Among other anti-pastoral things his work is full of, a la O'Hara, are movies (Ava Gardner tales are a particular fondness), music (he used to write a music column for the San Diego Reader) and art (one poem is called 'On First Looking Into Joseph Cornell's Diaries, a surely, post-modern swat at the Keats AND Cornell. The results can be equally strong as poetry and as penetrating musical commentary. In 'A History of Western Music: Chapter 13' he writes about Theolonious Monk 'on the stage of the Salle Pleyel' in 1954, instructing his French rhythm section how to play his tune 'Trinkle Tinkle' by getting up to dance and show them 'where the accents drop / where not / and those weird spaces in between.' Which, to vast credi

Praise for The Strange Hours Travelers Keep: "[Kleinzahler's] scope is large, his diction wildly exact, his line inventive, his means varied, and he never condescends." --Maureen N. McLane, The New York Times Book Review "Erudite, restless, intellectually curious, alert to what goes on around him from the moment he opens his eyes in the morning, [Kleinzahler] brings to mind Frank O'Hara . . . Wonderful." --Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books "Kleinzahler mixes the pungent and the delicate, the literary and the colloquial, to create a fine, technicolor-like excess." --John Palattella, The Los Angeles Times