SOURCE: A review of Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window, in West Coast Review, Vol. 10, No. 3, February, 1976, p. 41.

In the excerpt below, Newton notes Bukowski's equation of individualism with isolation.

Poems written before jumping out of an 8 story window is not Bukowski's best book; it is too hurried. But it does contain all his familiar subjects: his drinking, writing, and sex; he haunts dirty bars, cheap hotel rooms, and the night streets of Los Angeles. The classic Bukowski characters are the whores, bums, and the solid bartenders. All this occurs at the brink of modern society: Los Angeles. In fact, Los Angeles is very important in his poems, because the poet who takes this bewildering location as his home will almost surely confront the modern complexity in his poems. Bukowski presents everyone as modern man who has come to know everything, yet at the same...