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

Softcover, 80pp

New Directions Publishing, New York, June 2025 

Originally published by Angel Hair Press in 1978