Works and Days - Bernadette Mayer

A brand-new collection, Works and Days is classic Bernadette Mayer: fresh, learned, exciting, and endlessly surprising. Part springtime journal (“why are there thorns?“), Works and Days meditates on the first wasps and chipmunks of the season, time’s passage, grackle hearts, and dandelions, while also collecting dozens of poems considering the Catholic Church, Sir Thomas Browne, “Go Away“ welcome mats, books, floods (“never of dollar money“), the invention of words, local politics, friendships, property development, dogs, and Hesiod. Every page delights. As the poet herself notes: “My name is Bernadette Mayer, sometimes / I am at the head of my class.“

I don't mean to get all
Parallel universey on you
But I am at once the spider
The spider web, and
Me observing them

“The richness of life & 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

“One of the most interesting, exciting, and open of experimental poets.“
–– Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle

“Mayer's work is marked with Dorothy Parker's bite and bawdiness and Gertrude Stein's inventive discourse.“
–– The Antioch Review

“One of the most original writers of her generation. All her work is full of brilliant observations, 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

Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn in 1945. A prolific poet, she is the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship and now lives in East Nassau, New York. Works and Days is her seventh book with New Directions.

Published by New Directions, 2016
Paperbook, 112 pages
ISBN: 9780811225175
15 × 23 cm