Frank Lima's first collection of poetry in twenty-five years. The best of his long out-of-print poetry from the 60's and 70's as well as a wealth of material from the last two decades.

More critical praise for Inventory:

"One decade of Suffering City Withdrawal Pains is focused here in the few poems a young man finds in his head by Art Miracle and offers Futurity, a little free Joy from Frank Lima."

"When so much of the dross of the Sixties has fallen away, it is breathtaking to re-encounter the exemplary, tender, incandescent, incendiary, utterly authentic poems of Frank Lima...What makes that discovery all the more starteling is the more recent poetry, which shows Lima has been with us all along, continuing to write lyrical, imaginative poemas humanos. He has kept the faith; it is now our job to take in his accomplishment"

"Frank Lima is a tough man and a gifted poet. "Mom I'm All Screwed Up" would be breathtaking for its honesty and courage even if it weren't so well written. These poems are very original and very good. The shock I get from reading them is not only from seeing what the life they describe is really like, but also from seeing something new in the way of art

from David Shapiro's introduction, "Frank Lima: The Poetry of Everyday Life and the Tradition of American Darkness"

"Frank Lima's poetry is a poetry of everyday life, but only a poet of enormous strength and fearlessness is capable of describing the everyday. One might say that the life Lima describes is so exceptional that it cannot or should not be placed under the idea of the everyday. But I think his inventory of traumata in childhood, of drugs and dangers, of incarceration and release, of his triumphs as a man, a father and husband, a cook, a translator, an artist-this inventory in its inclusiveness of urban space is exactly what the French thinker Lefebre meant by the production of the everyday. Lefebre suggested that the real philosophy of modern life could be accomplished by the description of a single day. Lima, learning from poets as various as Villon, Neruda, O'Hara, Lowell, and Corbiére, emerges with a mixture of day and dream that is a maximal realism and rendering of his more than half-century of living. It's a story of survival and, crowned by his compassion, much more than any facile listing of a victim's horrors. He concludes this volume with extraordinary poems of religious depth and poems that create a public, even vatic voice-poems for all victims, for a Hasidic youth, for those bombed in Oklahoma, for an older mortal prophet, and for his own children glimpsed in their fragility and resilience."

a brief history of Frank Lima

Frank Lima was born in New York City in Spanish Harlem, 1939. His parents were Mexican and Puerto Rican. He received a Master's from Columbia University in 1975. During the 60's and 70's he published three books of poetry and was included in many anthologies. In the late 70's, Lima dropped out of the poetry world (although he continued to write) to devote his time to family and pursue a career in the culinary arts. Trained in his youth in classical French cooking, he is now a teacher at the New York Restaurant School.

other books by Frank Lima

Inventory, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1964
Underground with the Oriole, E.P.Dutton, 1971
Angel, W.W. Norton, 1976