Perhaps Bernadette Mayer's greatest work, Midwinter Day was written on December 22, 1978, at 100 Main Street, in Lenox, Massachusetts. "Midwinter Day", as Alice Notley notes, "is an epic poem about a daily routine". 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".

Poetry. "Alice and anime, Asia and uncertainty, we do so want our sounds to make sense, our textual travels to have a guide, even if that guide is the white rabbit that will hide. Aaaaaaaaaaalice is the sound and sight of the disappearing rabbit, the one with a hat, the one who pops up with regular unpredictability whenever we go somewhere not here, and while words will swivel around us like our very own heads, making the unfamiliar familiar and the familiar unfamiliar, making no sense but nonsense and non-sense sense, like in this very text, what's moreover curious, as Karmin rightly notes, is that 'yesterday a man was walking'"--Vanessa Place.

Two sisters, an artist and a poet, describe the contours of their lives among New York's artistic avant-garde through an intimate collection of letters This collection of the correspondence between artist Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) and poet Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) occurs between the years of 1976 and 1980, a period of rich creativity in New York's artistic avant-garde, and one which includes the development of major bodies of work by the two women. Rosemary Mayer was creating sculptures, watercolors, books and temporary monuments from weather balloons and snow, while Bernadette Mayer was working on some of her best-known publications, including the book-length poem Midwinter Day and the poetry collection The Golden Book of Words. Spanning the worlds of Conceptual art, Postminimalism, feminism, the New York School, Language poetry and more, these letters elucidate the bonds of sisterhood through intimate exchanges about art, relationships and everyday life.

"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.

Comprised almost entirely of never-before-collected poems, Scarlet Tanager is Bernadette Mayer's first collection of new work in nearly a decade.