New Directions is proud to announce a riveting and galvanizing new book by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. At ninety-three, he shows more power than most any other poet at work today. Ferlinghetti describes his new book, <em>Time of Useful Consciousness</em>, as “a fragmented recording of the American stream-of-consciousness, always westward streaming; a people's poetic history in the tradition of William Carlos Williams' <em>Paterson</em>, Charles Olson's <em>Maximus</em>, Allen Ginsberg's <em>Fall of America</em>, and Ed Sanders' <em>America: a History in Verse</em>. 'Time of Useful Consciousness, is an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time in which some life-saving action is possible.”Ferlinghetti's first book since Poetry as Insurgent Art, the fierce and immediate <em>Time of Useful Consciousness</em> presents poetry written “in ways that those who see poetry as the province of the few and educated had never imagined” (<em>The New York Times Book Review</em>).