A Superintendent’s Eyes. [Signed] Dalachinsky, Steven [Very Good] [Softcover]

Description

129 pages : illustrations ; 18 cm. Softcover. Perfectbound wraps. Book Condition: wear to the extremities and edges, spine and lower corner of back panel creased; lacking the called for errata slip; binding very sound, interior clean and bright and unmarked. This is the true first edition, a tiny printing (300 copies!) dispensed mostly to libraries at the time. In 2013 an expanded edition was brought forth by Unbearable Books to a wildly enthusiastic reception; from critic Alan Kaufman’s review at the time of publication: It is the single most important volume of poetry to appear in the last ten years.He is the poet that America has been waiting for to free our national verse from its stratospheric sense of self-importance and return us to a poetry of flesh and heart, song and cement, just as Whitman’s Leaves of Grass did in in the nineteenth Century. Signed by the great man himself (Dalachinsky) to the ffep and doubly rare as such. Accessed from assorted online sources: Born in Brooklyn in 1946, much of the chronology of Dalachinsky’s life and work is unclear. He had been publishing chapbooks and individual poems since at least the early 1980s; although the 2009 anthology Reaching into the Unknown contains writing that dates back to 1964, it wasn’t until 2000 that he published his first full-length book of poems, A Superintendent’s Eyes. He was a prolific reader and performer of his own work for much longer, however, and had appeared on at least three albums as a spoken-word artist. Dalachinsky claimed the influence of Kafka, Camus, Blake, and visual arts. A Superintendent’s Eyes was based primarily on his years as the superintendent of a building in SoHo, where he lived for 40 years. Avant-garde jazz is just one inspiration for my writing/poetry, he said in 2016, though I admit it’s been a big one. It was certainly the one that figured in his most acclaimed work: the groundbreaking 2006 collection The Final Nite, which consisted of poems written over 19 years-entirely at and about performances by saxophonist Charles Gayle. The book received a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2007. From his obituary online on the wire: Steve Dalachinsky died on 16 September 2019. Witnesses report that having attended Saturday’s Sun Ra Arkestra concert shortly before his stroke, the legendary wiseass’s last words were: Maybe I overdosed with Sun Ra..