"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

"Bernadette Mayer is among the most influential poets of the late 20th century and to the present, with much of that interest falling to her earliest works. At the age of 15, in 1960, Mayer began writing and instantly with an incarnate directness and resource belying her youth. Over the next two decades, this precocious start would culminate in a body of writing extraordinary in its range and import. Even given that Mayer was moving in a New York milieu given to radical practice--as evidenced in the journal 0 to 9 she co-edited in the late '60s--these books in their collective force represent an explosion of poetic forms and investigation as profound and sustained as American poetry perhaps has seen"--Publisher's website, Nov. 20, 2015.

Poetry. New work from one of the best known contemporary American poets. "I have a book full of beds but I'm not scared/ Now I wont write the poem about sleeplessness since/ I cant sleep again even with Dash who sleeps so well/ & I wont about dreaming that sleep is 1/3 Egg St./ Or about dreaming I finally got some sleep, I wont write: Sleep, I cant come tonight" - from "On Sleep."

Web site offers online texts of Mayer's work as well as biographical and bibliographical notes.

Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh wrote Piece of Cake as a work of collaborative prose poetry, based on a process of each writing on alternate days in the course of August of 1976-the bicentennial year of the America's Declaration of Independence. It recounts the quotidian details of daily activities, negotiating the exigencies of young, married-with-children life, the artistic path and citizenship. It has the classic "I did this, I did that" of a New York School of Poetry text, as characterized by the poetry of Frank O'Hara, and is somewhat reminiscent of Mayer's work Studying Hunger Journal, written not long before taking up Piece of Cake. Another distinguishing feature of this work is that it is arguably the first significant male-female collaboration in 20th century American poetry. Regarding the possible derivation of the work's title, and exemplary of the work's tenor, is the start of Warsh's entry of August 29: "I also recall getting up and eating a piece of left-over cake (a very sweet store-bought cake with green or possibly pinkish icing) and drinking a glass of milk at the kitchen window. Empty streets, no moon. Michael and Twinkie asleep on the floor of Bernadette's room, Guy and Karen in mine, Bill on the couch in the living room. Marie in her crib. Everyone 'dead to the world,' a phrase I dislike, what a full house."

Here in the authorized translation by James Graham-Luján and Richard L. O'Connell, with an illuminating biographical introduction by the poet's brother, Francisco García Lorca, are three tragic dramas by the great modern Spanish poet and playwright which have caught the imagination and won the critical acclaim of the literate world.

The Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century contains over 400 entries that treat a broad range of individual poets and poems, along with many articles devoted to topics, schools, or periods of American verse in the century. Entries fall into three main categories: poet entries, which provide biographical and cultural contexts for the author's career; entries on individual works, which offer closer explication of the most resonant poems in the 20th-century canon; and topical entries, which offer analyses of a given period of literary production, school, thematically constructed category, or other verse tradition that historically has been in dialogue with the poetry of the United States.