Very proud to be stocking this one. Tangerine Press is a new small UK private press dedicated to championing the visions of variously marginalised 20th/21st century poet-thinkers and this second collection of work from the late William Wantling is the kind of thorough, intelligently constructed presentation that his work has long been crying out for. Wantling was a veteran of the Korean War (though the precise nature of his involvement is still disputed) and a heroin addict and spent five years in San Quentin where he first taught himself to write. He was a contemporary of Douglas Blazek, AD Winans, Charles Bukowski, Hugh Fox et al and while there are certain stylistic and thematic similarities between his work and the various manifestations of the meat poets, Wantling has a specific, personal rhythm and an understated, resonant magic that is all his own. Many of his poems deal with his time as a junkie, rolling dopes, shooting up with girlfriends etc but there’s a transcendent quality to even his most low-down recollections, a sad self-knowledge as both participant and forgiving observer, and the way he can extrapolate universal experience and visionary epiphany from the slightest domestic detail or occluded memory fragment is extremely moving. He's a tough guy but his poetry is never fully armoured. I’ve been collecting Wantling for some time and it's a mark of just how deep editor and publisher Michael Curran has dug that there's a whole bunch of material in here that I had never encountered before, specifically Wantling’s remarkable study of Kafka’s The Castle entitled The World Order Is Based On A Lie, uncollected pieces from Wormwood Review, Entrails, Iconolatre and Input and 1965’s Heroin Haikus. There are also excerpts from major publications such as Head First, Down, Off & Out, From The Jungle’s Edge, Sick Fly, 10,000 rpm & Digging It, Yeah! and more. The books themselves are gorgeous, running to 112 pages, handbound with cloth-covered heavy duty acid-free boards; Ruhr Milk Chocolate cloth; distinctive Tangerine Press stamped relief design on the cover; text in Baskerville Old Face. Available in a run of 100 numbered copies and 26 lettered copies, this is a must-have for any serious poetry collector and soon to be a highly-valued collector’s item. The lettered copies come with 160gsm Poppy Red Mi-Teintes endpapers, 100gsm Natural White acid-free text paper; colour title page with a different design to numbered copies; a insert 1973 Wantling letter broadside printed on Honey 160gsm paper and dates from late 1973 and a poetry broadside printed on Aquamarine 160gsm paper. All lettered lettered editions also include specially printed extra poetry broadsides inserted at random. Very highly recommended.