Although small in volume this collection has so many topics, questions and half-answers, as all of Ferlinghetti's work. It's brilliant, three poems in particular I will carry with me for some time to come. Lawrence Ferlinghetti does it again, one of the few authors who has yet to let me down. ( )

It must be nice to be Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to know what is right and wrong so infallibly without having to give the matter any thought at all, not feeling the need to reassess your thoughts on the matter over the last thirty or forty years, and to continue churning out lines about how bad it is to think that capitalism is democracy, or that you can just slot environmentalism into your politics without considering that democracy and the protection of the environment are, in many ways, completely incompatible.

It must be nice, I guess, to go to sleep every night without worrying that the vaguely hippyish new-left 'anarchism' that you prefer is more or less identical to the capitalism that you claim to despise: each prefers to atomize societies, cultures, communities and institutions; each rejects the idea that there can be a common good; each considers the individual's desires to be prima facie good and right.

It must be wonderful, too, to be such a big name that you can keep writing derivative beat poetry, which occasionally rises to irony but is otherwise just a record of one person's thoughts and emotions put on a page in vague rhythms that virtually demand to be read as if every line was a question? because no thought is ever completed? and for whatever reason this is how poets read their poems? especially when they think they're performers?

That last was unfair; I've never heard him read. But otherwise this is an intellectually insulting rant. Much of what he hates deserves to be hated, but he has no reason to hate it other than a vague dislike of things that other people like. Might like to give that some thought. ( )