Two Haloed Mourners. Bernadette Mayer. Granary Books. 1998.

Two Haloed Mourners.

Granary Books, 1998. Item #GB_60

5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in., 42 pp., perfect bound wrappers.

“The books 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, The 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 All works in the book are previously unpublished except the title poem.

Printed on a photocopier. Cover image from a fresco by Aretino Spinello. Cover and book design by Philip Gallo at The Hermetic Press. This is from an edition of 800 copies, including a first printing of 100 (of which 17 are numbered and signed by the poet), a second printing of 200, and a third printing of 500 in 2000. This is from the third printing. Fine.




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Price: $20.00