edited by Rob Whitbeck
The Sparrow Survives is a remarkable collection of work by the California poet Leonard Cirino, an influential figure of the Mendocino Coast literary underground. Revered within the small press underground as an uncompromising outsider, Cirino offers meditations, homages, and cries in the dark that stand as a hidden gem of modern American poetry. After arriving in the Mendocino area in the late 1960s and enduring years of severe mental illness and psychiatric hospitalization, Cirino settled in Albion, California, where he began a rigorous, self-directed poetic apprenticeship modeled on poets from Asia, Europe, and Spanish America. Cirino founded Pygmy Forest Press in 1987 and published dozens of books (his work as well as others). Four his books are housed in the Kelley House Museum archives.
