Ratings3
Average rating4.3
I first read this book in the summer of 1965. Saw it beside Howl in a bookstore on Telegraph Avenue, probably Shakespeare & Co. It was delightfully iconoclastic, with overtones of Subterranean Homesick Blues. Well over my head at the time with its dense literary allusions and references to locations I hadn't experienced yet. 55 years later, more widely read and more widely traveled, it makes more sense now. Of course not all of it make sense to anyone now; there are numerous obscure autobiographical and personal allusions we may never understand.
Corso was nothing if not a master of mixed metaphors ... or a mister of maxed metaphors. Some poems make Subterranean Homesick Blues look like MacArthur Park.
It starts in San Francisco (“O anti-verdurous phallic ... “) and ends in Paris (“ ... Dollhouse of Mama War.”) with, in Ginsberg's words, “a box of crazy toys” in between.