Softcover. 8vo. 357 pp.  A biography of artist and poet Joe Brainard by his lifelong friend Ron Padgett. In fine condition, with the ownership signature of Frank Bidart to the ffe and his occasional markings in pen throughout. An important copy.

Bidart is acknowledged by Padgett for helping with the book and was an important friend of Brainard's especially towards the end of his life. From page 303, "In the fall of 1993, when Joe's illness kept him pretty much confined to his loft, Frank placed a standing weekly order with a florist who excelled in exotic and imaginative floral arrangements. Years later Frank told me, 'I knew Joe only for two short years, but he changed the way I saw things. He opened up my life.'"

From the collection of Frank Bidart, who received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, and the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry for his book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. Perhaps Bidart's most celebrated poem, "The Second Hour of the Night," is partly based on his relationship with Brainard. "The relationship was," as Bidart has said, both "more than friendship and less than a romance." His "In Memory of Joe Brainard" is a profound elegy for his friend who died of AIDS-induced pneumonia in 1994.