Milkweed Smithereens gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer poems: the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her Covid Diary and Second World of Nature to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive. The world of nature and the pandemic loom large, as in her "The Lobelias of Fear": ...but how will we, still alive, socialize in the winter? wrapped in bear skins we'll sit around pot-bellied stoves eating the lobelias of fear left over from desperation, last summer's woodland sunflowers and bee balm remind us of black cherries eaten in a hurry while the yard grows in the moonlight shrinking like a salary ...

Endlessly inclusive, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, first published in 1994 and long out of print, evokes the complexity of real persons as it simultaneously reinvents multiple genres: epistle, prose poem, and memoir. Written between 1979 and 1980 while pregnant with her third child, Mayer extends her imaginative letters into meditations for us all on life as it is lived in real time, with its responsibilities and manifold desires. Fierce, lyrical, intimate, and wise, both new and familiar readers, both mothers and non-mothers, will find this book beckoning again and again to offer delicious writing, timely information, consolation, and advice.

"Midwinter Day," as Alice Notley noted, "is an epic poem about a daily routine." A poem 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//Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/That takes the bite from winter weather/And weaves the random cloth of life together/And drives away the long black night!"

"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 humor. She is a consummate poet no matter what's for supper or who eats it. Would that all genius were as generous." -Robert Creeley

Part springtime journal (“why are there thorns?”), Works and Days meditates on the first wasps and chipmunks of the season, times’ 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.”

This boxed set of the first twelve collections in the New Directions Poetry Pamphlet series contains:

Osama Alomar's Fullbood Arabian H. D.'s Vale Ave Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Blast Cries Laughter Forrest Gander's Eiko & Koma Oliverio Girondo's Poems to Read on a Streetcar Susan Howe's Sorting Facts, or 19 Ways of Looking at Chris Marker Sylvia Legris's Pneumatic Antiphonal Bernadette Mayer's The Helens of Troy, New York Dunya Mikhail's 15 Iraqi Poets Alejandra Pizarnik's A Musical Hell Nathaniel Tarn's The Beautiful Contradictions Lydia Davis & Eliot Weinberger's Two American Scenes

HIGHLIGHTS: This collaboration of Worsely and Mayer provides numerous fun approaches to the writing process-from note-taking to journal entries to essay completion. Many of the exercises use concepts like logic, basic math, permutations, the Fibonacci scale, and "Pascal's Triangle," as models on which to base poems, while other exercises emphasize writing about natural science, in an engaging way. Inspiring examples are provided, in the back of the book, from Jane Goodall, Carl Sagan, Margaret Mead, Bertrand Russell, Steven J. Gould, and Albert Einstein, among others. And an annotated bibliography, serves as a list of recommended reading for students and teachers alike.

New work from one of America's most original experimental poets. Comprised almost entirely of never-before-collected poems, Scarlet Tanager is Bernadette Mayer's first collection of new work in nearly a decade. Mayer, "one of the most original writers of her generation" (The Washington Post), has mixed together here delightful epigrams ("The Mammal Epigram": "Sexually / it's cute"), long-line free verse, and her astonishing sonnets. There are also curious translations of Mayer poems into joking, free-styling French, which are then re-translated back into English, landing somewhere extremely witty and quite some ways from the original. There is no one writing today who can touch Bernadette Mayer for sheer pleasure and throw-away brilliance.

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. In 1972 Bernadette Mayer began this project as an aid to psychological counseling, writing in parallel journals so that, as she wrote in one (in bed, on subways, at parties, etc.), her psychiatrist read the other. Using colored pens to "color-code emotions," she recorded dreams, events, memories, and reflections in a language at once free-ranging and precise--a work that creates its own poetics. She sought "a workable code, or shorthand, for the transcription of every event, every motion, every transition" of her own mind and to "perform this process of translation" on herself in the interest of evolving an innovative, inquiring language. STUDYING HUNGER JOURNALS registers this intention within a body of poetry John Ashbery has called "magnificent."

Proper Name collects for the first time the inimitable stories of Bernadette Mayer-"one of the most original writers of her generation" (The Washington Post). The nineteen narratives of Proper Name include "My Excellent Novel," "Ice Cube Epigrams," "Essay: How Carefully Do We Tend?" and "Juan Gave Nora a Pomegranate." Mayer's structural inventions are terrific and unique. As Fanny Howe remarked in The American Book Review, "In a language made up of idiom and lyricism, Mayer cancels the boundaries between prose and poetry."