Love is a Dog From Hell

A classic in the Bukowski poetry canon, Love Is a Dog from Hell is a raw, lyrical, exploration of the exigencies, heartbreaks, and limits of love.

A book that captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable, on a subject that hits home with all of us. Charles Bukowski was a man of intense emotions, someone an editor once called a “passionate madman.” Alternating between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty, Bukowski lays bare the myriad facets of love—its selfishness and its narcissism, its randomness, its mystery and its misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power.

“there is a loneliness in this world so great

that you can see it in the slow movement of

the hands of a clock.”

This is Bukowski at his most contradictory and compelling.

• Raw and Honest Poetry: Bukowski holds nothing back, chronicling the selfishness, misery, and occasional, redemptive joy of human connection.
• Beat Poetry: Capturing the voice of a “passionate madman,” these poems reject convention for a lyrical, street-level view of life and love.
• Love and Loneliness: An unflinching look at the failures of love, exploring the profound solitude that can exist even between two people.
• Gritty Realism: From dive bars to cheap rooms, experience the underbelly of American life through the eyes of its most uncompromising poet.