Prolific poet, award-winning translator, esteemed critic—“certainly the best poetry critic in sight,” according to Lawrence Ferlinghetti—essayist and journalist, editor and novelist, Stephen Kessler has been a constant creative force in the American literary counterculture for more than fifty years. In Last Call Kessler records with grief and wit, documentary realism and ranging imagination, poignancy , irony, and reflection a journey through the gains and losses of a lifetime. His emotional honesty, conversational lyricism and wry melancholy are down to earth, heart-opening and consciousness-wrenching, retro-romantic and totally contemporary. Open this book to any page and find the unmistakably authentic voice of Stephen Kessler.