The Golden Book of Words - Bernadette Mayer

This landmark early book by the late great Bernadette Mayer is finally available again. Mayer was a marvelous poet in every stage of her long and prolific writing life, but many fans especially relish her restless, powerful, sexy, and erudite early work. One of her signal elements is a deadpan wit, on full display here with classic poems 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 it's too late to begin farming
I guess we'll never have a farm
I guess we're too old to do farming [...]
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

New Direction, 2025
English
Softcover, 80 pages
152mm x 228mm