Lunch Poems [Paperback]

Important poems by the late New York poet published inThe New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bearand stranger places.

Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal.

O’Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call. Few books of his era show less age. --Dwight Garner, New York Times

As collections go, none brings. . .quality to the fore more than the thirty-sevenLunch Poems, published in 1964 by City Lights. --Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review

What O'Hara is getting at is a sense of the evanescence, and the power, of great art, that inextricable contradiction — that what makes it moving and transcendent is precisely our knowledge that it will pass away. This is the ethos at the center of “Lunch Poems”: not the informal or the conversational for their own sake but rather in the service of something more intentional, more connective, more engaged. --David L. Ulin, Los Angeles TImes

The collection broadcasts snark, exuberance, lonely earnestness, and minute-by-minute autobiography to a wide, vague audience—much like today's Twitter and Facebook feeds. --Micah Mattix,The Atlantic

Among the most significant post-war American poets, Frank O'Hara grew up in Grafton, MA, graduating from Harvard in 1950. After earning an MA at Michigan in 1951, O'Hara moved to New York, where he began working for the Museum of Modern Art and writing for Art News. By 1960, he was named Assistant Curator of Paintinglól