Penguin Modern Classics

''I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday''

Freewheeling and spontaneous, Mexico City Blues is Jack Kerouac''s most significant and emblematic poem. Consisting of 242 loosely linked ''choruses'', it takes in life, death, spirituality, jazz improvisation, memory, fantasies and dreams, all infused with the rhythm of the blues, to create a surreal and all-encompassing epic.

''A spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature'' Allen Ginsberg

''A jazz poet. His sentences frequently move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls and sometimes they have something of the rich music of Gerard Manley Hopkins or Dylan Thomas'' The New York Herald Tribune