Item #ANT133 Next to Nothing. Paul Bowles.

Next to Nothing

Kathmandu, Nepal: Bardo Matrix. Starstreams Poetry Series, no. 5. 8vo (7 ½ x 9 ½ in.) side-sewn in wraps. 13 pp. Printed on handmade rice paper and bound with thread. Edition of 500, this copy is not numbered. Verifaxed cover. Excellent condition. Item #ANT133

This Bardo Matrix publication is a book of poetry by Paul Bowles, who was an American expatriate writer and composer who spent most of his life in Morocco. Ira Cohen states in his essay on the Bardo Matrix Press, ”In 1976 Paul Bowles sent me his poem, Next to Nothing, written specially for Bardo Matrix. Although I knew that Paul expressed a preference for an unadorned presentation of the text with little or no graphics, I ended up using six different design elements by six different artists. Beginning with a verifax collage on the cover by Maya who assembled a glove, razor blade, hairpin, emblematic patches including in eagle, several stars and a butterfly rising on the horizon and ending with a Kufic design supplied by Paul on the back cover, there was also a skull colophon drawn by Lee Baarslag from a human skull I had found in Kathmandu, a collage by Dana Young tipped in as a photographic print, an elegant geometric design by Sydney Hushhour, who was visiting from San Francisco and Petra Vogt's rapidograph drawing, Bone Ship Passing.”.

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