Milkweed Smithereens

A career-spanning bouquet of poems by the peerless and inimitable 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 …