A Bernadette Mayer Reader - Bernadette Mayer

A Bernadette Mayer Reader is mostly of pieces that were originally published in small press books and chapbooks, magazines, and anthologies. The book holds poetry and prose from Mayer’s earliest works to then-contemporary publications. From Story (1968), to excerpts from Desires of Mothers and Midwinter Day (1982), and including a cache of new poems, this is a sprawling, surprising collection of Mayer at her best.

Reader was met with praise from peers and critics alike. In the words of Jackson Mac Low, "[Mayer] never gets stuck in one place - she changes as the spirit moves her - and her structural inventions and self-revelations provoke surprise and delight."

Of the publication, Fanny Howe writes, "America could prove that her conscience, heart, and intelligence are still operating with this one volume of poetry."

"What a clear, insistent health there is here––as if the so-called world were seriously the point, which it is, and we could actually live in it, which we do. Truly this is the best How To book I've read in years. Bernadette Mayer makes a various world of real people in real times and places, a fact of love and loving use. She has impeccable insight and humour. She is a consummate poet no matter what's for supper or who eats it. Would that all genius were as generous."
–– Robert Creeley

"She writes as if Everything were still possible in the work of a lifetime at the coincidence of all the turvy moments. Better that she's read without a thought to stop. Best so this world is found changed."
–– Clark Coolidge

"Bernadette Mayer is a poet of extraordinary inventiveness, erotic energy and challenge, and ironic intelligence. This selection testifies to the formal and emotional range of her accomplishment. It is the record of an enduring strain in American poetry, at once reflective and improvisatory, lyrical and tough. Language lives in it."
–– Michael Palmer

Published by New Directions, 1992
First edition in 1992
Design by Ellen C. Dawson
148 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1203-8
13.5 × 20.5 cm (5 ⅜ × 8 ⅛ inches)