Book excerpt: The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best poetry from America's most iconic and imitated poet, Charles Bukowski. Celebrating the full range of the poet's extraordinary sensibility and his uncompromising linguistic brilliance, these poems cover a lifetime of experience, from his renegade early work to never-before-collected poems penned during the final days before his death. Selected by John Martin, Bukowski's long-time editor and the publisher of the legendary Black Sparrow Press, this stands as what Martin calls 'the best of the best of Bukowski'.