An early, scarce chapbook by American poet Ben Mazer, one of the so-called Harvard Wits who was associated with particularly bohemian Boston-area literary culture especially during the first decade of the 2000s.
- Publisher: Cy Gist Press
- Year: 2007, first edition
- Press designation: CGP7
Contains fourteen titled poems on fourteen leaves (28 pages) on cream-colored stock and sewn through the fold with thread. The book is bound in heavy bean-green paper wrappers, with a contrasting lime-green inner wrapper serving as endpapers.
Colophon:
Johanna Poems was printed in an edition of 200, including a special Editor's Run, numbered 1-50. Text set in Hoefler Text, titles set in Harrington. Cy Gist Press is edited by Mark Lamoureux. Cover illustration by the author.
The collection occupies an important early position in Mazer’s bibliography. Following his first collection, White Cities (1995), Johanna Poems appeared before The Foundations of Poetry Mathematics (2008), Poems (2010, Pen & Anvil), and the succession of collections that established Mazer as a noteworthy voice in contemporary American poetry.
The book was launched in Harvard Square on March 14, 2007, when Mazer and poet Stephen Sturgeon gave a joint reading at the Democracy Center. The event was sponsored by the famous Grolier Poetry Bookshop.
The rear cover bears an extraordinary endorsement by Sturgeon:
Whose poems are these? It looks like the heads of a hundred people made them, yet there is no disjunction, no coil of expression, no tragic dissolution here that fails our understanding. Don Juan, at the end of his life entrapped in a mineshaft, might have called these poems up to us. We need more of these poems, quickly, and we are in a state of perpetual penury now, for only one person, Ben Mazer, can supply them, and however much he provides there will always be gasping for more.
Condition: A fine copy. No chipping, no markings, no missing elements. Penciled bookseller's information appears faintly on the back cover, top left corner. Minor half-inch crease on the front cover below the thread insertion, as shown in the photo.
