The New York Times: Into Charles Bukowski? Hard to be, isn’t it? And I’ve tried. But there is a genius there, and this is an interesting reviewing of “Come On In,” the latest posthumous publication. He ain’t Wordsworth, but it’s art.

While aesthetically brutal, these considerations have a way of exposing pretense, even the pretense of exposing pretense. Bukowski makes Allen Ginsberg look like a mandarin. That his poems get an F for craft doesn’t bother him; since his life gets an F too, he achieves an extraordinary correspondence between word and action. And perhaps this is what he was after, with the headlong effort to kill himself with drinking and brawling – pummeling his life into simple enough terms to be within reach of a limited art.