Cloth of the Tempest offers moving commentaries on war and selfhood. Patchen's singature experiments with poems-in-drawings-and-type introduced a new medium.
Patchen's biographer wrote that he "developed in his fabulous fables, love poems, and picture poems a deep yet modern mythology that conveys a sense of compassionate wonder amidst the world's violence." Along with his friend and peer Kenneth Rexroth, he was a central influence over the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation.
