Hottentot Ossuary by James Tate. 1974 Temple Bar, first paperback edition of 1400 printed, 77 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)." Hottentot was his first book of prose.

Condition: VG, cover worn

"There was a taste of honey on the razor blade, honey that sucks bees."