Viper Jazz by James Tate. 1976 Wesleyan University Press, paperback edition, 79 pages. Tate was a Pulitzer and National Book award-winning poet.  According to his obituary in the Guardian: "James Tate . . . was one of the most original and inventive American poets of his era, whose sense of humour and love of the tall story calls to mind an earlier Missouri-born master of the fable, Mark Twain...An iconoclast and an original, Tate won both the Pulitzer prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams award for his Selected Poems of 1991, the National Book award for Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994), and the Wallace Stevens award (1995)." Viper was his fifth book.

Condition: Good+, wear to cover

"I'm not even thanked

for the pairs of ancient socks

I leave everywhere"