Hunk of skin

These rare poems by Pablo Picasso were discovered in Malaga by a roving City Lights editor in 1965, and this is their first publication in English in book form. The eminent Spanish editor and novelist, Camilo José Cela, has furnished a special note to this edition, giving the circumstances of their creation and publication. The trnslator, Paul Blackburn, is well known as a translator of Spanish and Provençal and as a poet in his own right.

A note to the original Spanish edition speaks of trozo de piel as expressing "Picaso´s nostalgia for his boyhood in Malaga: all his memories of the land where he was born, suddenly arisen..."