Lunch Poems is a book of poetry by Frank O'Hara published in 1964 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, number 19 in their Pocket Poets series. The collection was commissioned by Ferlinghetti as early as 1959, but O'Hara delayed in completing it. Ferlinghetti would badger O'Hara with questions like, "How about lunch? I'm hungry." "Cooking", O'Hara would reply. O'Hara enlisted the help of Donald Allen who had published O'Hara's poems in New American Poetry in 1960. Allen says in his introduction to The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, “Between 1960 and 1964 O’Hara and I worked intermittently at compiling Lunch Poems, which in the end became a selection of work dating from 1953 to 1964.”