What was the title of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 1958 poetry collection about a famous amusement district?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 1958 poetry collection about a famous amusement district was A Coney Island of the Mind.

New Directions published the collection in 1958. Its title invokes Coney Island, the Brooklyn seaside entertainment area, but the poems range beyond that location into urban life, politics, art, mortality, and popular culture. Ferlinghetti’s accessible language and performance-oriented rhythms helped make the book one of the best-known poetry volumes associated with the Beat era.

The collection was not simply a book about amusement parks. Its Coney Island image functions as a broad metaphor for modern spectacle and the crowded American imagination. The title is also sometimes misremembered as “Coney Island in the Mind,” but the canonical wording uses “of.”

Ferlinghetti was both a poet and the founder of City Lights Books, a San Francisco publisher and bookstore central to Beat literary culture.