"With a title suggestive of both the figural and abstract, this collection spans nearly fifty years of Bill Berkson's poetry in all its deftness and variety. Full of nuance, intensity, and exuberant wit, his poems engage a mix of topics and styles to create a body of work suffused with light."-- BOOK JACKET

Praise for Bill Berkson: "A serene master of syntactical sleight and transformer of the mundane into the marvelous." -- Publishers Weekly "That was Bill through and through, still curious and receptive after a lifetime of glamorous soldiering through the fields of art and poetry." -- City Lights, "Homage to Bill Berkson" Wide-ranging and experimental, Expect Delays confronts past and present with rare equilibrium, eyeballing mortality while appreciating the richness and surprise, as well as the inevitable griefs, inherent in the time allowed. Dress Trope Critics should wear white jackets like lab technicians; curators, zoo keepers' caps; and art historians, lead aprons to protect them from impending radiant fact. Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Poetry. Drama. Fiction. This book contains rare unpublished and out of print poems, a play, and an unfinished 'novel', all written in collaboration in the early 1960's. HYMNS comprises the full run of poetry and prose the two poets wrote in collaboration between 1960 and 1964. Two-thirds of these have never before appeared in book form. Berkson's and O'Hara's "hymns," inspired by the crooked steeple of the Church of St. Bridget on New York's Lower East Side, address themes of love, protestation, travel and more. (The final two are songs in praise of the New York School master painters, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston.) The other writings include further collaborative poems; a lengthy epistolary fiction involving two long-lost brothers, Angelicus and Fidelio Fobb; Marcia, an Unfinished Novel (with Patsy Southgate), a play written on a jetliner over the Atlantic, and dizzying notes on the New York City Ballet and the French 'cubist' poet Pierre Reverdy.

Poetry. Art. In the back of BILL, Bill Berkson writes: "The words and title for BILL popped out of a juvenile detective novel Tom Veitch gave me around 1980. Instantly, just flipping through this little illustrated book occasioned an emergency. The editorial imagination went to work. Soon, having typed a series of short sentences, paragraphs and stray phrases towards the bottom edge of unusually thin 8 1/2" by 11" sheets... I set aside the twenty-or-so pages and forgot about them." The story was then shelved in a manila folder for 25 years. Berkson revisited the story in 2006 and decided the blank pages needed artwork. With the help of Mac McGinnes, it was decided that artist Colter Jacobsen would be a perfect fit. Jacobsen found inspiration for the project in a collection of postcards dating from early the 1900s through the 1980s. With a slow and deliberate attentiveness he began a series of drawings: "I felt I was responding to another time, nearer to when I was born, a time thirty years before I was born, and recontextualizing these times into images for today." Within a year, the new BILL emerged, "a fresh creation, in its present splendor."