"Frank Lima is an American Villon."David Shapiro
Protégé of Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and Allen Ginsberg, the streetwise Puerto Rican/Mexican poet Frank Lima was the only Latino member of the New York School during its historical heyday. Born in Spanish Harlem in 1939, he endured a difficult and violent childhood, discovering poetry as an inmate of the juvenile drug treatment center under the tutelage of the painter, Sherman Drexler, who introduced him to his poet friends. Rubbing shoulders with everyone from Edwin Denby and Joe Brainard to Jasper Johns to the de Koonings, Lima appeared in key New York School anthologies and published two collections of his own with prominent publishers. In the late seventies, Lima left the poetry world to pursue a successful career as a chef, and though he rarely published, and his work fell out of circulation, he continued to write a poem a day until his death in 2013.
Incidents of Travel in Poetry is a landmark re-introduction to the work of this major Latino American poet. Beginning with poems fromInventory (1964), his installment in the
legendary Tibor de Nagy poetry series,Incidents includes selections from Lima’s previous volumes, tracing his development from his early snapshots of street life to his later
surrealist-influenced abstract lyricism. The bulk of the collection comes from his later unpublished manuscripts, and thus, Incidents represents the full range of Lima’s work for the
first time. Edited by poets Garrett Caples and Julien Poirier, it includes a biographical introduction.
