Mexico City Blues

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.