Incidents of Travel in Poetry

"Frank Lima is an American Villon."--David Shapiro Protege of Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Allen Ginsberg, the streetwise Puerto Rican/Mexican poet Frank Lima was the only Latino member of the New York School during its historical heyday. Born in Spanish Harlem in 1939, he endured a difficult an [...]
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"Frank Lima is an American Villon."--David Shapiro Protege of Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Allen Ginsberg, the streetwise Puerto Rican/Mexican poet Frank Lima was the only Latino member of the New York School during its historical heyday. Born in Spanish Harlem in 1939, he endured a difficult and violent childhood, discovering poetry as an inmate of the juvenile drug treatment center under the tutelage of the painter, Sherman Drexler, who introduced him to his poet friends. Rubbing shoulders with everyone from Edwin Denby and Joe Brainard to Jasper Johns to the de Koonings, Lima appeared in key New York School anthologies and published two collections of his own with prominent publishers. In the late seventies, Lima left the poetry world to pursue a successful career as a chef, and though he rarely published, and his work fell out of circulation, he continued to write a poem a day until his death in 2013. Incidents of Travel in Poetry is a landmark re-introduction to the work of this major Latino American poet.Beginning with poems from Inventory (1964), his installment in the legendary Tibor de Nagy poetry series, Incidents includes selections from Lima's previous volumes, tracing his development from his early snapshots of street life to his later surrealist-influenced abstract lyricism. The bulk of the collection comes from his later unpublished manuscripts, and thus, Incidents represents the full range of Lima's work for the first time. Edited by poets Garrett Caples and Julien Poirier, it includes a biographical introduction. "Finally. Finally. Finally. Here's the Frank Lima collection that poetry lovers worldwide have been waiting for. Lima was an authentic outlier and Incidents of Travel transcends and decolonizes any attempt at easy categorization. With this new body of work, we are reaping the price Lima paid for being ostracized. Our reward? The dream we wish we could have, whispers that hint of a new waste land, and we'll always be in his debt for having Lima as a guide."--Willie Perdomo, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon. "Frank Lima is a masterful writer of ecstatic, devastating, and hauntingly personal poetry.His candor is irresistible and transformative, as cuttingly witty in one poem as elegiac and sorrowful in the next. Complete with its nuances and disappointments, nobody writes the poetry of domestic reverence quite like Lima. In this generous selection of work from the poet's life, including poetry from 1997 onward, we can finally solidify Lima as a figure of crucial importance to our understanding of the New York School writers. This work shines with all the love and labor of Lima's thoroughly American experience, one which is inextricable from the trauma of cultural duality. Lima's voice speaks to us like an intimate friend, a co-conspirator in hope. 'Blessed are the poets who invented us as poets,' he writes in a poem for David Shapiro, an ode to both his best friend and to poetry. Blessed are we now to have this landmark collection of work from Frank Lima. This book is a long overdue treasure."--Wendy Xu