Like a great heavyweight in the ring with that final indomitable adversary, Bukowski went down swinging. The 175 posthumously published new poems of Bone Palace Ballet once again prove his mettle, showing the banged-up old champ still on his feet and gamely slugging it out with the inevitable: "after this long fight / I have no intention of / quitting short. / or late. / or satisfied".

The life-narrative skills that made Bukowski the finest verse storyteller of his time are still alive and kicking in these verse tales, vivid fragments shored against time's ruin. The dance of death in Bukowski's bone palace takes shape as autobiography: yarns about his Depression childhood and early literary passions (from lusting after his high school English teacher to covertly devouring forbidden' books), his apprentice days as a hard-drinking, starving poetic aspirant ("working on the last bottle of /wine, /the sheets of your / writing strewn across the / floor. / you have walked on and across / them, / your masterpieces, /and/either/they'll be read in /hell, /or perhaps / gnawed at by the/curious/mice"), and finally the bittersweet later years, when, having been rendered by history "just / another old fart in a world of old farts", he nonetheless remains able to look back over his shoulder at Fate with a measure of undefeatable defiance.