Hotel Lambosa

Coffee-To-Go Short-Short Stories Series

by Kenneth Koch

"Short-shorts that are beautifully observed, refreshingly good humored, and packed with pleasing details of a colorful life in the bohemian 60's . . . Original, shapely, and richly detailed scenes from the not-too-distant past."-- Kirkus Reviews ¶"Passages of sumptuous language chanted for the ear."-- Washington Sunday Times

Genres: Fiction, Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1993

About the author

Kenneth Koch is most often recognized as one of the four most prominent poets of the 1950s-1960s poetic movement "the New York School of Poetry" along with Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and James Schuyler. The New York School adopted the avant-garde movement in a style often called the "new" avant-garde, drawing on Abstract Expressionism, French surrealism and stream-of-consciousness writing in the attempt to create a fresh genre free from cliché. In his anthology The New York Poets, Mark Ford writes, "In their reaction against the serious, ironic, ostentatiously well-made lyric that dominated the post-war poetry scene, they turned to the work of an eclectic range of literary iconoclasts, eccentrics and experimenters."

Fiercely anti-academic and anti-establishment, Koch's attitude and aesthetic were dubbed by John Ashbery his "missionary zeal." Ford calls him "the New York School poet most ready to engage in polemic with the poetic establishment, and the one most determined to promote the work of himself and his friends to a wider audience." Koch died of leukemia at age 77, leaving a legacy of numerous anthologies of both short and long poems, avant-garde plays and short stories, in addition to nonfiction works dealing with aesthetics and teaching poetry to children and senior citizens.

Reviews

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Koch tries his hand at (very) short fiction, inspired by Yasunari Kawabata's "Palm-of-the-Hand Stories." As per usual, it has an air of miscellaneousness (there are stories about zombies and ping pong and Saint-John Perse) but it's predominantly autobiographical, and even more revealing than KK's later poetry in that vein (he writes about his wife's miscarriage, for instance; in fact, pregnancy is a constantly recurring theme). Highly recommended if you already love Koch, but also if you find his zaniness annoying and want to see what he's like in a more restrained setting.

[James Grinwis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Koch's poetry but was not as compelled by his flash fictions here. While this collection ('93) represents an earlier foray into the flash genre by significant American poets, it does not have the nuance and strengths say of what the later career James Tate did with his more outrightly narrative poems in books like Memoir of the Hawk. Still I found this a beautifully produced volume by Coffee House Press and the first person tiny fictions here I found frequently personal and delightful.