Lunch Poems [Paperback]

Essential poems by the late New York poet.

Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O'Hara's freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry.

Edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his monumentalThe New American Poetryin 1960, it contains some of the poet's best known works including The Day Lady Died, Ave Maria, and Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]. These are the compelling and formally inventive poemscasually composed, for example, in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry readingthat made O'Hara a dynamic leader of the New York School of poets.

O'Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few books of his era show less age. Dwight Garner,New York Times

As collections go, none brings . . . quality to the fore more than the thirty-sevenLunch Poems, published in 1964 by City Lights. Nicole Rudick,The Paris Review

What O'Hara is getting at is a sense of the evanescence, and the power, of great art, that inextricable contradiction  that what makes it moving and transcendent is precisely our knowledge that it will pass away. This is the ethos at the center ofLunch Poems: not the informal or the conversational for their own sake but rather in the service of something more intentional, more connective, more engaged. David L. Ulin,Los Angeles TImes

The collection broadcasts snark, exuberance, lonely earnestness, and minute-by-minute autobiography to a wide, vague audiencemuch like today's Twitter and Facebook feeds. Micah Mattix,l³°