EDWARD ABBEY continues to grow in stature as one of America's funniest and most profound twentieth-century writers. Brooding, iconoclastic, prophetic, Abbey was principally known as a prose writer, the author of such legendary works as The Monkey Wrench Gang, Desert Solitaire, and The Brave Cowboy. Although Abbey rarely published his poetry, he was, unbeknownst to his loyal and often fanatical public, a passionate producer of verse, and these seventy-one original poems—never before published in any form (although several were rejected by the leading magazines of the nation)—offer an insightful and wrenching look into the mind of this great man known to some as "Cactus Ed." To read these poems, all written between 1952 and 1989, and culled from his Journals, is to feel the ineffable, irrefutable essence of Edward Abbey. The poems frequently alternate between the joy and pain that marked his life, and all brandish his immutable character and nonconformity. Whether writing about his love of wild doves, his unadulterated hatred of New York City, or his fondness for bawdy women, Abbey was unapologetically passionate—and these poems will only add to his literary reputation and mythic stature. Not bad for a spud-digging farm boy out of rural Pennsylvania.