Overview

This landmark early book (its original printing by Angel Hair Books was 750 copies, and they are now extremely rare) by the late great Bernadette Mayer is finally available again, both as a tribute and a joy to read. Mayer was a marvelous poet in every stage of her long and prolific writing life, but many fans most admire her restless, powerful, sexy, and erudite early work. One of her signal elements is a certain deadpan wit, on full display here with classics such as ""Lookin' Like Areas of Kansas"" or ""What Babies Really Do,"" or the marvelous ""Essay"": I guess it's too late to live on the farm I guess it's too late to move to a farm I guess it's too late to start farming I guess farming is not in the cards now… I guess farming is really out … I don't want to be a farmer but my mother was right I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing Or on as little as one needs to survive Steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly

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9780811239684

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Reviews

""""The richness of life and time as they happen to us in tiny explosions all the time are grasped and held up for us to view in her magnificent work."""" -- John Ashbery """"Mayer writes the kind of nonsense that makes sense, and sense that is nonsense: I can’t think of a better catering device in these topsy-turvy times."""" -- Daniel Wenger - The New Yorker """"Bernadette Mayer is one of the most original writers of her generation. All her work is full of brilliant observation, humorous and sometimes astounding conclusions, and amazing juxtapositions inspired by linguistic associations, patterns of movement, chance, mathematics, whim, and imagination."""" -- The Washington Post ""The poetry of Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022) is as whimsical and difficult as raising children, one of her main subjects... Mayer’s avant-garde, fragmentary language echoes the cacophony of a full house, or is it the other way around?"" -- The New Yorker

""Bernadette Mayer is one of the most original writers of her generation. All her work is full of brilliant observation, humorous and sometimes astounding conclusions, and amazing juxtapositions inspired by linguistic associations, patterns of movement, chance, mathematics, whim, and imagination.""-- ""The Washington Post"" ""Mayer writes the kind of nonsense that makes sense, and sense that is nonsense: I can't think of a better catering device in these topsy-turvy times.""--Daniel Wenger ""The New Yorker"" ""The richness of life and time as they happen to us in tiny explosions all the time are grasped and held up for us to view in her magnificent work.""--John Ashbery

""""The richness of life and time as they happen to us in tiny explosions all the time are grasped and held up for us to view in her magnificent work."""" -- John Ashbery """"Mayer writes the kind of nonsense that makes sense, and sense that is nonsense: I can’t think of a better catering device in these topsy-turvy times."""" -- Daniel Wenger - The New Yorker """"Bernadette Mayer is one of the most original writers of her generation. All her work is full of brilliant observation, humorous and sometimes astounding conclusions, and amazing juxtapositions inspired by linguistic associations, patterns of movement, chance, mathematics, whim, and imagination."""" -- The Washington Post

Author Information

Called “a consummate poet” by Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. A most prolific poet, her first book was published at the age of twenty-three. Many texts later she continues to write progressive poetry from her home in East Nassau, New York. For many years Mayer lived and worked on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she was the Director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1980-1984. Bernadette Mayer has received grants and awards from PEN American Center, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the NEA, The Academy of American Poets, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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