Midwinter Day - Bernadette Mayer

Perhaps Bernadette Mayer’s greatest work, Midwinter Day was written on December 22, 1978 at 100 Main Street, in Lennox, Massachusetts. “Midwinter Day,“ as Alice Notley noted, “is an epic poem about a daily routine.“ In six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day—morning, afternoon, evening, night—to dreams again: “…a plain introduction to modes of love and reason, / Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season / Now I’ve said this love it’s all I can remember / Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December.“

“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 this magnificent work of prose and poetry that teaches us at the end why 'no one knows why / Nothing happens.'“
— John Ashbery

“One of the most interesting, exciting, and open of late-20th century experimental poets.“
— Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle

“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.“
— Michael Lally, The Washington Post

“Love and the seasons and the exigencies and opportunities of daily survival are the inevitable occasions of a body of work that is as radical as it is Horatian, able as little else is both to delight and instruct.“
— Edwin Frank, Boston Review

Published by New Directions, 1999
The cover is a detail from a drawing by Rackstraw Downes
Cover design by Erik Rieselbach
Paperbook, 120 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1406-3
15 × 23 cm (5 ⅞ × 9 inches)