Bernadette Mayer

Milkweed Smithereens gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer poems: the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her Covid Diary and Second World of Nature to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive. The world of nature and the pandemic loom large, as in her “The Lobelias of Fear”:

…but how will we, still alive, socialize
in the winter? wrapped in bear skins
we’ll sit around pot-bellied stoves eating
the lobelias of fear left over from desperation,
last summer’s woodland sunflowers and bee balm remind us of black
cherries eaten in a hurry
while the yard grows in the moonlight
shrinking like a salary …

Part springtime journal (“why are there thorns?”), Works and Days meditates on the first wasps and chipmunks of the season, times’ passage, grackle hearts, and dandelions, while also collecting dozens of poems considering the Catholic Church, Sir Thomas Browne, “Go Away” welcome mats, books, floods (“never of dollar money”), the invention of words, local politics, friendships, property development, dogs, and Hesiod. Every page delights. As the poet herself notes: “My name is Bernadette Mayer, sometimes / I am at the head of my class.”

I don’t mean to get all

Parallel universey on you

But I am at once the spider

The spider web, and

Me observing them

New Directions is happy to announce the publication of a new series of Poetry Pamphlets, a reincarnated version of the “Poet of the Month” and “Poets of the Year” series James Laughlin published in the 1940s, which brought out such eclectic hits as William Carlos Williams’s The Broken Span, Delmore Schwartz’s poetic play Shenandoah, John Donne’s Some Poems and a Devotion, and Yvor Winters’s Giant Weapon, among many others. The New Directions Poetry Pamphlets will highlight original work by writers from around the world, as well as forgotten treasures lost in the cracks of literary history.

Included in this set of four are:

Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, by Susan Howe

Two American Scenes, by Lydia Davis & Eliot Weinberger

Pneumatic Antiphonal, by Sylvia Legris

The Helens of Troy, New York, by Bernadette Mayer

Profiles of all the women named Helen in Troy, NY, with poems and images, mixing the classical with the ordinary and delightful intelligence with irreverence.

everybody died there’s nothing more to say my hair’s braided like a family i took off, it was fun, i loved it if you did something wrong, they punished you one helen is enough, trust me

Called “a consummate poet” by Robert Creeley and “a poet of extraordinary inventiveness, erotic energy and challenge, and ironic intelligence” by Michael Palmer, Bernadette Mayer can be found in all her variety in Poetry State Forest, which contains nature poems, sonnets, prose poetry, pastiches, long sequences, and epigrams.

Comprised almost entirely of never-before-collected poems, Scarlet Tanager is Bernadette Mayer’s first collection of new work in nearly a decade. Called “magnificent” by John Ashbery and “consummate” by Robert Creeley. Mayer mixes together delightful epigrams (“What it means to be a mammal / sexually /it’s cute”), long-line free verse, and her astonishing sonnets. There are also curious, extremely witty translations of Mayer poems into joking, free-style French, which are then re-translated back into English, landing quite some ways from the original. There is no one writing today who can touch Bernadette Mayer for sheer pleasure and indelible brilliance.

Perhaps Bernadette Mayer’s greatest work, Midwinter Day was written on December 22, 1978 at 100 Main Street, in Lennox, Massachusetts. “Midwinter Day,” as Alice Notley noted, “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.”

Proper Name collects for the first time the inimitable stories of Bernadette Mayer––“one of the most original writers of her generation” (The Washington Post). The nineteen narratives of Proper Name include “My Excellent Novel,” “Ice Cube Epigrams,” “Essay: How Carefully Do We Tend?” and “Juan Gave Nora a Pomegranate.” Mayer’s structural inventions are terrific and unique. As Fanny Howe remarked in The American Book Review, “In a language made up of idiom and lyricism, Mayer cancels the boundaries between prose and poetry.”

“Truly this is the best How To book I’ve read in years. Bernadette Mayer makes a various world of real people in real times and places, a fact of love and loving use. She has impeccable insight and humor. She is a consummate poet no matter what’s for supper or who eats it. Would that all genius were as generous.” – Robert Creeley

Be strong Bernadette



Nobody will ever know



I came here for a reason



Perhaps there is a life here



Of not being afraid of your own heart beating



Do not be afraid of your own heart beating



Look at very small things with your eyes



& stay warm

From “The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica”