Poems of disarming honesty and sharp humor, written with innate passion and moving straightforwardness. Charles Bukowski writes about love, lust, and desire in the first person, sometimes with harshness and cynicism, other times with sensitivity and tenderness, thus sketching the multiple versions of the enamored person. His poems, entertaining or not, often playful, speak of the allure of the mysterious and sex, the rejection or acceptance by the object of desire, the egoism and narcissism of the enamored subject, and ultimately, the redemptive power of love. Poems revealing of the man and writer Bukowski—he refers to them in his lovers and friends, but also his daughter and his work—who, with his heartbreakingly familiar, contemplative manner, elevates love to a prism through which he sees the world full of beauty and savagery, as well as his own vulnerable position in it. I pass by the hotel at 8 and 5; the alleys have cats and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I don't know where you are anymore, and I continue on my way and wonder where life goes when it stops.