Midwinter Constellation - by Becca Klaver (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

On December 22, 2018, the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer's writing of Midwinter Day, 32 women poets typed into Google Docs titled Dreams, Morning, Noontime, Afternoon, Evening, and Night. Following the six-part structure of Mayer's book, they composed alongside each other all day, dozens of cursors blinking in a virtual happening. Midwinter Constellation is the result. Part patchwork quilt, part collective consciousness, the book hopes " to prove the day like the dream has everything in it," as Mayer wrote in 1978, and to extend her vision into a global 21st-century everyday. A radical experiment in collective writing, the book embroiders, echoes, and blurs the voices of poets across the U.S. and beyond. While threads of identity can be traced through the repeated names of children, highways, books, and pets, Midwinter Constellation declines to identify who's speaking when, exceeding the territory of authorship and rejecting the illusion that we are separate.

Review Quotes

Challenging capitalism's relationship to the world as one of objects for use or ownership, the collective of writers of Midwinter Constellation write in creative participation against forms of certainty, mastery, and possession. Boundaries collapse as new psychogeographies form in modes of response and reflection "for history to be like food / On the table of the window". A welcomed space of unruly measure. A constellation of meetings, wild and wonderful. --Hoa Nguyen

"Bernadette Mayer is the mother of us all." Overheard in Brooklyn. Midwinter Constellation, a luminous collaborative poem written on the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer's epic poem Midwinter Day, is a conversation between 32 women poets and the poet herself. This gathering of poet-daughters continues Mayer's experiments with form and content to make a portrait of the possibilities of living within the shortest day of the year. Midwinter Constellation raises the bar of what can be written, captures the fullness, the sensuousness, even the tastiness of living with lovers and children. --Brenda Coultas

About the Author

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore, 2010), Empire Wasted (Bloof, 2016), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence, 2020), as well as several chapbooks. Her most recent projects include the 32-poet collaboration Midwinter Constellation (Black Lawrence) and the chapbook of postcard poems Greetings from Bowling Green (The Magnificent Field). As an editor, she co-founded Switchback Books, is currently co-editing the anthology Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia Books), and has created pop-up projects such as Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants. She lives in Iowa City, where she works as Program Manager of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.