Poetry. Shark Books' CEREMONY LATIN (1964) reprints this key work from Bernadette Mayer's early, highly experimental period. In it, Mayer produces poetry that at turns exhibits both a disjunctive minimalism and a penchant for oddly skewed narrative. Much of early Language Poetry can be traced here; presaging what would come in early work by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, Mayer writes in one poem "smells/lemon sachet: heavy sweet/unsettling/sandalwood smell: drunken/violets descending/penetrating perpetrating/sex/air wick to drown the/shit smell/cooking." A most welcome return for this seminal work.

Author City: East Nassau, NY USA

Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received her B.A. from the New School for Social Research in 1967. She is the author of more than two dozen volumes of poetry including ETHICS OF SLEEP (2011), Poetry State Forest (2008), Scarlet Tanager (2005), Two Haloed Mourners (1998), ANOTHER SMASHED PINECONE (1998), Proper Name and Other Stories (1996), The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994), The Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992), The Formal Field of Kissing (1990), Sonnets (1989), Midwinter Day (1982), The Golden Book of Words (1978), and CEREMONY LATIN (1964). From 1972 to 1974, Mayer and conceptual artist Vito Acconci edited the journal 0 TO 9, and in 1977 she established United Artists Press with the poet Lewis Warsh. She has taught writing workshops at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City for many years, and she served as the Poetry Project's director during the 1980s. Bernadette Mayer lives in East Nassau, New York.

Reviews and Other Links
Bernadette Mayer @ PennSound