Incidents of Travel in Poetry ― New and Selected Poems

"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 fromInventory (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 The bulk of the collection comes from his later unpublished manuscripts, and thus, Incidents represents the full range of Lima's work for the first time.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.

Born in Spanish Harlem in 1939, Frank Lima endured a difficult and violent childhood, discovering poetry as an inmate of the juvenile drug treatment center on North Brother Island in the East River, under the tutelage of the painter, Sherman Drexler. Through Drexler, Lima met Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and other members of the New York School of poets, leading to his first book,Inventory (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1964). After publishing two further volumes,Underground with the Oriole (Dutton, 1971) and Angel: New Poems (Liveright, 1976), and earning an MFA at Columbia University in 1976, Lima withdrew from the poetry world, pursuing a successful career as a professional chef. A new and selected poems, also called Inventory (Hard Press), edited by David Shapiro, appeared in 1997. He continued to write a poem a day, but seldom published, for the rest of his life. He died in 2013.

Garrett Caples is a poet who lives in San Francisco. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections,The Garrett Caples Reader (Black Square, 1999) and Complications (Meritage, 2007), a pamphlet,Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English (Wave, 2010), and a book of essays,Retrievals (Wave, 2014). He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (California, 2013) andParticulars of Place (Omnidawn, 2015) by Richard O. Moore. He has a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley. A freelance writer, he is also an editor at City Lights Books.

Julien Poirier is the author of several poetry collections, including El Golpe Chileno (Ugly Duckling, 2010),Stained Glass Windows of California (Ugly Duckling, 2012), and the forthcomingWay Too West (Bootstrap) and Out of Print (City Lights). In 2005, he published an experimental newspaper novel,Living! Go and Dream (Ugly Duckling). He is also the editor of an anthology of writing by Jack Micheline,One of a Kind (Ugly Duckling, 2008), and a book of travel journals by Bill Berkson,Invisible Oligarchs (Ugly Duckling, 2015). A founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse Collective, Poirier edited the newspaperNew York Nights from 2001 to 2006. He has taught poetry in New York City public schools and at San Quentin State Prison. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and two daughters.