Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.

Donald Allen (1912-2004) was Director of Grey Fox Press. Among the literary collections he has edited are The Postmoderns, The Poetics of the New American Poetry, and The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca; he is the translator of Four Plays of Eugène Ionesco.

"[Frank O'Hara's] work seems to me to represent the last stage in the adaptation of twentieth-century avant-garde sensibility to poetry about contemporary American experience. In its music and its language and in its conception of the relation of poetry to the rest of life, it is a poetry which has already changed poets and others, and which promises to go on moving and changing them for a long time to come."—Kenneth Koch, The New Republic

"During the halcyon days of the Abstract Expressionist and Imaginative Realism movements, 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."—Herbert A. Leibowitz, New York Yimes Book Review

“Slangy and sharp, genially surreal, the work of the quintessential New York poet shines like polished granite.”—Entertainment Weekly

Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry

New York Times Obituary, September 9, 2004