An occasional poet whose three slight books are some of the purest manifestations of the Beat writer's aesthetic of spontaneous expression, Peter Orlovsky is more famous as the companion of Allen Ginsberg than as a poet in his own right. Closely associated with Ginsberg's life and work since 1955, Orlovsky nevertheless projects a personality of his own, captured over the past twenty years in a handful of often humorous outbursts of wildly personal lyrics as he proceeds with unguarded heart "singing and saying anything that passes" in his mind.

Peter Orlovsky was born in "the vanished Women's Infirmary in Lower East Side N.Y." on 8 July 1933, the third son of his parents Oleg and Katherine Orlovsky. His father (born in 1901) was a Russian immigrant who had been a cadet in the czar's army in St. Petersburg in his youth. As a guard at the Winter Palace during the 1917 Revolution...