What a clear, insistent health there is here as if the so-called world were seriously the point, which it is, and we could actually live in it, which we do. Truly this is the best How To book I've read in years. Bernadette Mayer makes a various world of real people in real times and places, a fact of love and loving use. She has impeccable insight and humor. She is a consummate poet no matter what s for supper or who eats it. Would that all genius were as generous. Robert Creeley"

"Midwinter Day," as Alice Notley noted, "is an epic poem about a daily routine." A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again: ." . . a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December//Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/That takes the bite from winter weather/And weaves the random cloth of life together/And drives away...

HIGHLIGHTS: This collaboration of Worsely and Mayer provides numerous fun approaches to the writing process-from note-taking to journal entries to essay completion. Many of the exercises use concepts like logic, basic math, permutations, the Fibonacci scale, and "Pascal's Triangle," as models on which to base poems, while other exercises emphasize writing about natural science, in an engaging way. Inspiring examples are provided, in the back of the book, from Jane Goodall, Carl Sagan, Margaret Mead, Bertrand Russell, Steven J. Gould, and Albert Einstein, among others. And an annotated...