Time of Useful Consciousness

New Directions is proud to announce a riveting and galvanizing new book by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. At ninety-three, he shows more power than most any other poet at work today. Ferlinghetti describes his new book,Time of Useful Consciousness, as “a fragmented recording of the American stream-of-consciousness, always westward streaming; a people’s poetic history in the tradition of William Carlos Williams’Paterson, Charles Olson’sMaximus, Allen Ginsberg’sFall of America, and Ed Sanders’America: a History in Verse. ‘Time of Useful Consciousness, is an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time in which some life-saving action is possible.”Ferlinghetti’s first book since Poetry as Insurgent Art, the fierce and immediateTime of Useful Consciousness presents poetry written “in ways that those who see poetry as the province of the few and educated had never imagined” (The New York Times Book Review).