Before Dawn on Bluff Road / Hollyhocks in the Fog: Selected New Jersey Poems / Selected San Francisco Poems - Paperback

by August Kleinzahler (Author)

A collection of August Kleinzahler's best poems, divided--like his life--between New Jersey and San Francisco

When August Kleinzahler won the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, the judges' citation referred to his work as "ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers." They might also have added "between New Jersey and San Francisco," the places Kleinzahler has spent his life traveling between, both on the road and on the page.

This collection assembles the best of his New Jersey and San Francisco poems for the first time, organized according to place, with each city receiving its own title and cover.

Providing readers with a gorgeous guide to Kleinzahler's interior geography, Before Dawn on Bluff Road (New Jersey) and Hollyhocks in the Fog (San Francisco) function as both word-maps and word-anatomies of one of our greatest poet's lifelong passions and preoccupations.

Author Biography

August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949. He is the author of several books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. His collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. That same year he received a Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Francisco.