“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 “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

A Bernadette Mayer Reader (New Directions Paperbook, 739)

Literature & Fiction

Mayer, Bernadette

Poetry

New Directions

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."

Proper Name & Other Stories (New Directions Paperback; 824)

United States

Perhaps Bernadette Mayer's greatest work, Midwinter Day was written on December 22, 1978, at 100 Main Street, Lenox, Massachusetts. "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!"

Midwinter Day

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.

Scarlett Tanager: Poetry

“One of the most interesting, exciting, and open of late-20th century experimental poets.”―Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle Bernadette Mayer mixes together nature poems, pastiches, sonnets, prose poetry, and epigrams to create Poetry State Forest.

Poetry State Forest

Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet Series", All the Helens of Troy is Bernadette Mayers's profile of all of the Helens living in Troy, New York, done with poems and images.
Part of our revived "Poetry Pamphlet Series", All the Helens of Troy is Bernadette Mayers's profile of all of the Helens living in Troy, New York, done with poems and images, mixing the classical with the ordinary and delightful intelligence with irreverence.
An excerpt:
everybody died
there’s nothing more to say my hair’s braided like a family i took off, it was fun, i loved it
if you did something wrong, they punished you one helen is enough, trust me

The Helens of Troy, New York (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)

Collections 1-12 in New Directions' Poetry Pamphlet series
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 &amp; 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 &amp; Eliot Weinberger's Two American Scenes

Poetry Pamphlets 1-12 (Boxed Set) (New Directions Poetry Pamphlets)

Howe, Susan

Doolittle, Hilda

FERLINGHETTI, LAWRENCE

Tarn, Nathaniel

Weinberger, Eliot

Gander, Forrest

Davis, Lydia

PIZARNIK, ALEJANDRA

Mikhail, Dunya

Alomar, Osama

Girondo, Oliverio

Legris, Sylvia

A brand spanking 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, 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.”

Works and Days

A career-spanning bouquet of poems by the peerless and inimitable Bernadette Mayer 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 …

Milkweed Smithereens

The Golden Book of Words

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Books by Mayer, Bernadette