"The book starts out dense, vagrant, proceeding on a combination of automatic writing and methodical structural repetitions. It picks up speed, changes gears from poetry to prose and back again, tries out a sestina where both beginning and ending words recur. Then something explodes midway through the book, as though all this formal experimentation was the rumbling and smoldering of Mt. Saint Helens erupting over the circumstances of Bernadette Mayer's move back to the Lower East Side from New Hampshire, where what was menace in the air of rural America is met head-on in the New York of Reagan and Wall Street. Two Haloed Mourners is a memoir of fear and loathing as the seventies somersault into the eighties. It's also about not shutting down, as a person, in the midst of that." —Ange Mlinko, Poetry Project Newsletter

Lewis Warsh assembled the manuscript for Two Haloed Mourners from writings in Bernadette Mayer's archive. All works in the book are previously unpublished except the title poem. Designed by Philip Gallo. Cover image from a fresco by Aretino Spinello. Printed on a photocopier. Bound in paper wrappers. 1998. 8 1/2" x 5 1/2;" 42 pages. First printing of 100 Second printing of 200 (1999) Third printing of 500 (2000)

ISBN: 1-887123-40-7 (trade paper) $12.00