“
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.
Yet for all his gruffness and love of dive bars, he is no Bukowski. 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.”
