A reissue of Bernadette Mayer's classic fugitive intergenre text

This one is all adventure in the event, a scaling of the exigent, an act of utter tell beyond the call. In contingency detail, at hypnagogic rates, she meets you in mind of a reckoning. Here is the endlessly inclusive Bernadette, the one from whom comes. And so at last these once secret letters are addressed to everyone. Clark Coolidge

Poetry. Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Drama. "Motherhood and housewyfery and other worldly concerns of the female artist-provider ride rampant here in this bustling exploding book of prose & poem meditations. One of our best writers does it again"--Anne Waldman. Prose, verse, letters, and plays, THE DESIRES OF LETTERS is a searing commentary on writing, mothering, and the navigation of politics, community, and imagination. An homage to Bernadette Mayer's The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, the book begins at the onset of the 2003 Iraq war and becomes "transformative...[in] its negotiation of the global and the domestic, beauty made bittersweet with annoyance and exhaustion, all that advice about how to raise a child and write at the same time"--Juliana Spahr.

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".

Bringing a provocative perspective to the poetry wars that have divided practitioners and critics for decades, Gillian White argues that the sharp disagreements surrounding contemporary poetics have been shaped by “lyric shame”—an unspoken but pervasive embarrassment over what poetry is, should be, and fails to be. Favored particularly by modern American poets, lyric poetry has long been considered an expression of the writer’s innermost thoughts and feelings. But by the 1970s the “lyric I” had become persona non grata in literary circles. Poets and critics accused one another of “identifying” with lyric, which increasingly bore the stigma of egotism and political backwardness. In close readings of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Bernadette Mayer, James Tate, and others, White examines the social and critical dynamics by which certain poems become identified as “lyric,” arguing that the term refers less to a specific literary genre than to an abstract way of projecting subjectivity onto poems. Arguments about whether lyric poetry is deserving of praise or censure circle around what White calls “the missing lyric object”: an idealized poem that is nowhere and yet everywhere, and which is the product of reading practices that both the advocates and detractors of lyric impose on poems. Drawing on current trends in both affect and lyric theory, Lyric Shame unsettles the assumptions that inform much contemporary poetry criticism and explains why the emotional, confessional expressivity attributed to American lyric has become so controversial.

Letters Home represents Sylvia Plath's correspondence from her time at Smith College in the early 1950s, through her meeting with, and subsequent marriage to, the poet Ted Hughes, up to her death in February 1963. The letters are addressed mainly to her mother, with whom she had an extremely close and confiding relationship, but there are also some to her brother Warren and her benefactress Mrs Prouty. Plath's energy, enthusiasm and her passionate tackling of life burst onto these pages, providing us with a vivid and intimate portrait of a woman who has come to be regarded as one of the greatest of twentieth-century poets. In addition to her capacity for domestic and writerly happiness, however, these letters also hint at Plath's potential for deep despair, which reached its crisis when she holed up in a London flat for the terrible winter of 1963.