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Mexico City Blues Audiobook
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From the renowned Beat writer Jack Kerouac comes this important work of lyric verse, one of his most formally inventive books.
A long poem in Kerouac’s freewheeling and spontaneous improvisational style, Mexico City Blues is a unique epic of sound, rhythm, and religion. Called superb sensory meditations, the poetry takes in life, death, and spirituality but roams widely across continents and cultures. Memories, fantasies, dreams, and surrealistic free association are all lyrically combined in the loose format inspired by jazz and the blues.
Considered a major contribution to post–World War II American poetics, it opened up a new way of writing that had a major influence on others, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Michael McClure, and Bob Dylan.
Kerouac began writing the 242 stanzas, or “choruses,” that became Mexico City Blues while living in Mexico City, with the stanzas defined only by the size of Kerouac’s notebook page. Written between 1954 and 1957 and first published in 1959, it is Kerouac’s most important verse work.
This poetry—wild, joyful, sad, and magnificent—is a surreal and all-encompassing experience and reveals the portrait of a complex man endowed with deep sensitivity.
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“A series of improvisations, notes, a shorthand of perceptions and memories, having in large part the same kind of word-play and rhythmic invention to be found in his prose.”
— Poetry magazine
Quotes
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“It blew my mind. It was the first poetry that spoke to me in my own language.”
— Bob Dylan, American singer–songwriter -
“A spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature.”
— Allen Ginsberg, American poet, writer, and Beat Generation pioneer -
“What seems to me to emerge at the end is a voice of remarkable kindness and gentleness, an engaging and modest good humor, and a quite genuine spiritual simplicity.”
— Hudson Review
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About Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) was an American novelist and poet who influenced generations of writers. He is recognized for his style of spontaneous prose and for being a pioneer of the Beat Generation. His first novel appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, published in 1957, that epitomized to the world what became known as the “Beat generation” and made Kerouac one of the best-known writers of his time. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, he attended local Catholic schools and then won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, other originators of the Beat movement.
About Andrew Eiden
Andrew Eiden, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is an actor and voice artist. He has been acting since the age of four, working at regional theaters including La Mirada Theatre, the Glendale Center Theatre, and the Pasadena Playhouse. He has starred in dozens of national commercials, guest-spotted on numerous television shows, and has been a series regular on three programs: Discovery Channel’s Outward Bound, Disney Channel’s Movie Surfers, and most notably ABC’s Complete Savages