Love Is a Dog from Hell is a raw, lyrical exploration of the exigencies, heartbreaks, and limits of love. This classic in the Bukowski poetry canon captures the Dirty Old Man of American letters at his fiercest and most vulnerable, on a subject that hits home with all of us.

Charles Bukowski, a man of intense emotions once called a “passionate madman,” alternates between tough and gentle, sensitive and gritty. He lays bare the myriad facets of love—its selfishness, narcissism, randomness, mystery, misery, and, ultimately, its true joyfulness, endurance, and redemptive power.

Poems rising from and returning to Bukowski's personal experiences reflect people, objects, places, and events of the external world, and reflect on them, on their way out and back.