At last! Neeli gets a book from City Lights, posthumously
published on July 1, 2025, the 80th anniversary of Neeli’s birth!

Neeli Cherkovski, born Neeli Cherry in San Bernardino California on July 1, 1945, passed away in San Francisco on March 19, 2024 at the age of 78, and is sorely missed. But reading from this wonderful volume is like spending a few hours over a succession of espressos at the Caffe Trieste with the loquacious poet and raconteur. And hearing his writing read by writers who knew and loved him well for decades is not to be missed!

The good gay poet who proudly wore the mantle of Whitman,
biographer of Ferlinghetti and Bukowski,
chronicler of his literary forebears and colleagues,
painter, friend of the common man,
observer of wildlife and the wild life, lover of fountain pens,
uncommon aesthete of many talents,
Neeli was also a good friend of the bookshop.

We’re delighted to host a half dozen of our favorite living poets
reading from his book in celebration of a life well lived. 

“A prolific poet and denizen of beatnik cafes who chronicled the literary ethos of bohemian culture.”—New York Times

In his final book, poet Neeli Cherkovski paints a portrait of his life through luminous details of encounters with his illustrious comrades.

Published on what would have been his 80^th birthday, The Portrait Gallery Called Existence finds the poet and memoirist combining these twin vocations in intimate depictions of his fellow artists and reflections on his family. The book follows Cherkovski from his early encounters in L.A. with poets like Wanda Coleman and Jack Micheline to his youthful heyday among the Beat Generation in North Beach, San Francisco, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. The passage of time is inevitably marked with the loss of beloved friends, recorded in elegies for recently deceased poets like Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, and Jack Hirschman, as well as a series of poems celebrating his close friendship with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Join Neeli as he drinks whiskey with Bob Kaufman in Chinatown, visits his gentle and impoverished hero John Wieners, and takes a terrifying drive through San Francisco with Ferlinghetti. Also included are several portraits of key poetic forebears, like Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and especially Rimbaud, examined from Cherkovski’s perspective in 1959 and 2023.

The book ends with memories of close family members and a number of moving self-portraits, as the poet confronts his own mortality and impending death. A powerful final statement from a master poet.