Softcover. 8vo. 101 pp. Light shelfwear, else fine. Ownership signature of Frank Bidart to the ffe. 

A single long poem by Ashbery with illustrations by Brainard, exemplifying "the possible interplay between verbal and visual art. Brainard finds perfect complementary images to reveal further delicate facts and observations throughout" (Terence Diggory, Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets, 2015). Joe Brainard's "drawing style was virtuosic, equal to all moods and genres, from the important 'suites' of high-contrast black ink drawings, like those in his collaboration with John Ashbery, The Vermont Notebook." (Kernan, p. 54).

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.