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"Frank O'Hara was the laureate of the New York art scene…. A Pan piping on city streets, he luxuriates in the uninhibited play of his imagination."—New York Times Book Review

Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series, is widely considered to be Frank O’Hara’s freshest and most accomplished collection of poetry. Edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O’Hara’s poems in his monumental The New American Poetry in 1960, it contains some of the poet’s best known works including “The Day Lady Died,” “Ave Maria,” and “Poem” [Lana Turner has collapsed!]. These are the compelling and formally inventive poems—casually composed, for example, in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in Times Square during his lunch hour, or on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading—that made him a cult hero. This new limited 50th anniversary edition contains facsimile reproductions of poems from the original typescript, along with a selection of previously unpublished correspondence between City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti and O’Hara and between Donald Allen and O’Hara that shed new light on the preparation of Lunch.

Frank O’Hara was born in 1926 in Maryland and grew up in Massachusetts. He was a leader of the New York poets, a group that included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest. He died in 1966, struck by a dune buggy on the Fire Island beach.