Written across several decades and gathered during a period of retreat, travel and spiritual practice, Book of Longing brings together Leonard Cohen's poetry, lyrics and drawings. 

Much of the work emerged during his years at the Mount Baldy Zen Center in California, where the disciplines of monastic life provided an unlikely setting for Cohen's continuing negotiations with erotic longing, religious devotion and the indignities of the self.

The poems move between prayer, confession, irreverence and romantic lament, frequently collapsing the distance between sacred experience and bodily appetite. Cohen's characteristic economy of language allows profound spiritual uncertainty to coexist with self-mockery, while his accompanying drawings and handwritten annotations introduce a visual dimension to the work, including portraits, recurring symbols and strange little declarations about identity and existence. An intimate record of a writer whose relationship to transcendence was always complicated by his considerable attachment to earthly pleasures.

Penguin Books, Melbourne, 2010. Australian Penguin paperback edition of the collection first published in 2006. Softcover, illustrated throughout with Cohen's own drawings and decorations. Good to very good condition, with light shelf wear and minor age-toning to pages.