"Isn't it odd, so very odd, that one of the loves of my idol should be writing me now? Perhaps life so works in stronger currents than we think", Charles Bukowski wrote in 1960 to Sheri Martinelli, Ezra Pound's former lover and sometime muse of the later Cantos. Martinelli had just rejected poems Bukowski had submitted to her Poundian literary magazine, the Anagogic & Paideumic Review, advising him to remain sober, pay the rent, brush his teeth, and above all, like her revered Master, consult the classics. At the time the 40-year-old Buk was still a relative unknown; he'd been "writing poetry for 5 years", as he told his outspoken new correspondent, "before that: 10 year drunk". He soon realized he'd met his match. Two years his senior, Martinelli had also been around the block. A self-styled "Street Princess", in Greenwich Village she'd been a Vogue model, painter, friend of Charlie Parker, protege of Anais Nin; in San Francisco a notable literary diva, dubbed "Queen of the Beats".

For the next seven years, these two strong personalities engaged in long-distance intellectual sparring and soul-baring confession. Martinelli sends cookies, health food recipes, astrological and editorial advice; complains of her current love problems; tells this man she's never met about her life-changing May/December affair with Pound: "he read me Dante, Villon, Guido, Kuan Tzu, the Sacred Edicts, Ovid...& seduced me whilst he read...sweet Gramps". Bukowski in turn argues with his "Sister in the Dust" about those he regards as literary impostors (Kerouac, Ginsberg), championing instead "poets of pure aspect" (Pound, Jeffers); reveals his trials along life's hard road, including incarceration for publicdrunkenness and periods of toil in a slaughterhouse and a dog biscuit factory; confesses his difficulties with the opposite sex ("women cannot stand me for long, perhaps it is that I am selfish, I will not submit my soul wholly, I save a secret piece for myself"). An engagement this intense was bound to cool. "Darling, we would never get along", Buk eventually acknowledges. "We are 2 bullheads". But while it lasts, this correspondence takes us for an unforgettable wild ride.

Unmasks the tough, street-smart persona of Charles Bukowski--America's "Ultimate Outsider" Amazing letters filled with passionate, literary, and personal observation Insights into the author of "Tales of Ordinary Madness," "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," and "Run with the Hunted" Insights into Sheri Martinelli: the protege of Anais Nin, an accomplished painter, and the mistress of Ezra Pound Charels Bukowski's persona as the Dirty Old Man of American Literature is just that: a persona, a mask beneath which there was a man better read and more cultured than most people realize.

Sheri Martinelli was one of the favored few for whom Bukowski dropped the mask and engaged in serious discussion of literature and art, and for that reason the discovery and publication of his letters to her give us a more complete picture of this complicated man.