Poetry. Winner of the 2005 Pen Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award for Poetry. From Los Angeles to San Francisco, from 1953 to now--Neeli Cherkovski uses bar scenes, cafe insights, family confessions, heartbreak and redemption, meditations on morality and the acceptance of self to transform memory, time and myth into an intimate poetic-memoir. He creates a window to the past and explores how time has shaped who he has become. It is here--the power of Cherkovski's talent surfaces. It is here he finds himself, like an old friend in a warm embrace, LEANING AGAINST TIME.

Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA

Neeli Cherkovski is a longtime contributor to the West Coast literary scene. Emerging from the Los Angeles underground of the Sixties, Cherkovski is an applauded poet, critic and literary biographer. He has written eleven books of poetry, including FROM THE MIDDLE WOODS, FROM THE CANYON OUTWARD, the award-winning LEANING AGAINST TIME, ELEGY FOR BOB KAUFMAN, and Animal; two acclaimed biographies, Bukowski: A Life and Ferlinghetti: A Biography; his book Whitman's Wild Children (a collection of critical memoirs) has become an underground classic. In the late 1960s Cherkovski co-edited the poetry anthology Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns with Charles Bukowski. Since 1975, Neeli has lived and worked in San Francisco. For ten years he was Writer-in-Residence at New College of California, where he taught literature and philosophy.

Reviews and Other Links
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/08/RVG02CI0F91.DTL
http://www.rattlesnakepress.com/Leaning_Against_Time.html
http://www.neelicherkovski.com/
http://rlcrow.com/services/reviews/LAT2.htm