First published 2022
This collection brings together the raw voices of two street poets who walked different paths through the same American landscape. Jack Micheline's verses pulse with the rhythm of wandering, while Charles Bukowski's four poems capture a specific moment in 1974 when he lived on Carlton Way in Los Angeles. The friendship between these writers shapes the book's core, showing how two outsiders found common ground in their rejection of polite society. Catfish McDaris adds three stories that extend this tradition of unvarnished truth telling. The poems move between barrooms and boarding houses, between hope and despair, always returning to the question of how to stay human in an inhuman world. What emerges is a portrait of artistic brotherhood forged in the margins of American life.
Genres: short-stories, american-fiction, 20th-century, american, poetry
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, raw
Tropes: found-family, outsiders
Setting: America, Los Angeles, Carlton Way
Period: 1974
50 pages · Paperback · Roadside Press