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the first year of their acquaintance. From 1962 onward the correspondence dwindled considerably; Bukowski understandably grew tired of Sheri’s constant carping, and she suffered a variety of personal crises in the early sixties that distracted her. They kept in touch, but the fire had gone out of their epistolary relationship. She also became increasingly annoyed by his references to her in some of his poems, which she considered an invasion of her privacy. The end came in April 1967, when Bukowski wrote her a rather impersonal letter mentioning that a new acquaintance of his, a speed freak with a Nazi fetish named John Thomas, claimed Sheri couldn’t have known Pound at St. Elizabeths. This stupid accusation, along with Bukowski’s distant tone and Sheri’s own increasing withdrawal from the world, ended their correspondence.
    The survival of these letters is due almost entirely to Sheri’s foresight. She not only saved and dated all of Bukowski’s letters to her, but made carbons of most of her letters to him. (Bukowski saved only about a dozen of her letters, mostly later ones.) Their publication is due to Gilbert Lee’s generosity in sharing these letters with me, and John Martin’s willingness to print them. All surviving letters have been included and are printed in full.
    Seamus Cooney has described the difficulties of reproducing Bukowski’s correspondence in his editions of Bukowski’s selected letters, and I have followed his editorial principles in transcribing these letters. Thus, words that were typed in all capital letters are set in small caps, or in italics if they are books or poetry titles. Deliberate misspellings have been retained, and a good number of unintended ones as well. (Bukowski consistently misspelled his first wife’s surname, for example, and never could get Allen Ginsberg’s surname right, no matter how often Sheri spelled it correctly.) Bukowski was often drunk or hung over when he typed these letters, so many of his irregularities can be attributed to drink rather than an inability to spell. Consequently, only meaningless misstrikes and typos, and a few misleading misspellings, have been corrected. (Bukowski would sometimes type a word three or four times until he got it right; in such instances, only the final attempt has been retained.) His punctuation, even when drunk, is fairly good, and has not been amended.
    Sheri’s letters present a different challenge: a better typist than Bukowski—though she too sometimes wrote under the influence of alcohol or other substances—she had her own system of punctuation and, like Pound, constantly indented lines so that her letters look more like pages from The Cantos than normal letters. (Also like Pound, she often used British spelling and punctuation and had the tiresome habit of using dialect for comic effect.) She wrote in phrases rather than in sentences, and separated her phrases either with virgules/ like this/ or with sawed-off suspension points.. like this.. (using only two periods instead of the usual three). I have retained her idiosyncratic punctuation—though using the standard three suspension points—but have run most of her phrases together, breaking for new paragraphs when it seemed called for (and when she seemed to be doing so, though her erratic spacing often makes this difficult to ascertain). I hope the effect of her prose is thus preserved while making it easier on the eyes. As in Bukowski’s case, some of her trivial or misleading misspellings have been corrected, though not all.
    Conventional indented paragraphing has been imposed throughout—Bukowski usually began his paragraphs flush left, separated by line spaces, and Martinelli began hers wherever the typewriter carriage landed—except in those instances where the writers deliberately departed from conventional form. Handwritten signatures at the end of letters have been italicized. Both correspondents sometimes illustrated their letters—Bukowski with