Hardcover. 8vo. 48 pp. Illustrated boards, blue cloth spine, paper label to spine, fine. Boards in a protective mylar jacket. Signed by Elmslie on the limitation page where numbered 116 of 200 copies.  Laid-in are a Black Sparrow Press  promotional flyer-insert with Joe Brainard illustration, in very fine condition

With one of the finest cover designs by Joe Brainard: the subtle sexiness of the offset torso, the primary color bonanza of tattoo parlor staple images arranged into an almost occult figuration. Brainard made a series of works featuring tattoos throughout the early 1970s - one was featured on the cover of Artforum in 2001 - and tattoos of anchors and butterflies would appear throughout his work. Tattoos make sense as Pop art images, endlessly repeated and recycled bodily ads of the cultural imagination, and Brainard handles them with his quintessential humor and vulnerability. The gorgeously typeset title page anticipates Elmslie's cross-genre American imagination. Taken together, a good visual primer for Elmslie's buoyant, charming, and powerfully weird lyrical gymnastics in Circus Nerves. 

Kenward Elmslie's poetry and prose is often combined with the graphical work of other artists. A collection of his writing, Motor Disturbance (1971), won the Frank O'Hara Award for Poetry in 1971. He was awarded the National Endowment of the Arts Award for Power Plant Sestina (1967) and the Ford Foundation Grant. In 1973 Elmslie began work as editor and publisher of Z Magazine and Z Press, working to promote the work of other New York School artists such as John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, and perhaps most extensively, Joe Brainard. Elmslie s work with graphic artists such as Brainard combined poetry with art to emphasize their interconnectedness; his work in theatre demonstrates his commitment to art as a whole, not only to one medium.