Lunch Poems (1964)

• Published: City Lights Books (Pocket Poets 19), San Francisco, 1964
• Edition: First edition, first printing ($1.25 on rear wrapper)
• Binding: Original printed wrappers
• Pages: 76 pp.
• Dimensions: 16 x 12.5 cm
• Language: English
• Condition: Fine; unread.

Frank O'Hara wrote many of these poems on his lunch hour from the Museum of Modern Art, where he started on the front desk and became a curator; the back cover describes him pausing at a sample Olivetti to type them up. Ferlinghetti asked for the book in 1959, O'Hara took five years to assemble it, and City Lights published it in 1964 as number 19 of the Pocket Poets.

A Step Away from Them, The Day Lady Died, written on hearing of Billie Holiday's death, and Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!) made the city's ordinary distractions the substance of poetry and gave the New York School its most quoted book. O'Hara was killed two years later, at forty, on Fire Island; Lunch Poems remains the book through which most readers first meet him.