Works and Days

Bernadette Mayer

Powered by Mayer’s unique reflections on the mythologies of social and linguistic order, Works and Days possesses a rare combination of artfulness, critical acumen, and personality. The end result is a book that is at once formally inventive and disturbingly of our times.

— Michael Miller, NBCC

A brand spanking new collection, Works and Days is classic Bernadette Mayer: fresh, learned, exciting, and endlessly surprising

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Works and Days

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

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Edition Data

Paperback(published Jun, 28 2016)

ISBN

9780811225175

Price US

15.95

Price CN

20.95

Trim Size

6 x 9

Page Count

112

Bernadette Mayer

Contemporary American Poet

Powered by Mayer’s unique reflections on the mythologies of social and linguistic order, Works and Days possesses a rare combination of artfulness, critical acumen, and personality. The end result is a book that is at once formally inventive and disturbingly of our times.

— Michael Miller, NBCC

Her latest collection, Works and Days, which came out this June, is among her very best, colliding daily struggles (menstruation, money) with natural obsessions (blue herons, mushrooms) and big unanswerable questions (Is motherhood virtuous? Whither patriarchy?). All of this is undergirded by a hefty serving of irony… Mayer writes the kind of nonsense that makes sense, and sense that is nonsense: I can’t think of a better centering device in these topsy-turvy times.

— Daniel Wenger, The New Yorker

Sly, spry and unpretentious…

— Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune

Works & Days shows a veteran poet as relentless innovator.

— William Lessard, The Brooklyn Rail

Mayer’s new collection, Works and Days, mixes poems and journal entries, glorying in both the burgeoning of spring and the accidents and irruptions of language.

— Christine Smallwood, Harper's

The experience of reading Works and Days is exhilarating; it’s like encountering a new, never-before-seen contemporary artwork you know will stand the test of time…There is no other book from this year I’d more like to read again.

— Flavorwire

Like Hesiod’s famed work from nearly three millennia ago, Mayer’s diaristic book-length poem addresses matters of corruption and injustice, contemplates nature and housekeeping, and dips in and out of mythological imagery. That the collection is written in a freewheeling, humorous and exceedingly casual tone makes the profundity of Mayer’s observations all the more striking.

— Chicago Tribune

Comprising teensy, often inconsequential moments—like whether it’s rained or has been threatening to rain—these prosaic morsels are gorgeous and serene. Hardly any of Mayer’s days are spectacular, but her eye is so keenly attune to all that surrounds her that nearly everything feels touched with grandeur.

— The Paris Review

One of the most interesting, exciting, and open experimental poets.

— Tom Clark, San Francisco Chronicle

Mayer’s work is marked with Dorothy Parker’s bite and bawdiness and Gertrude Stein’s inventive discourse.

— The Antioch Review

Love and the seasons and the exigencies and opportunities of daily survival are the inevitable occasions of a body of work that is as radical as it is Horatian, able as little else is both to delight and instruct.

— Edwin Frank, Boston Review