WAKOSKI, Diane.
The Magellanic Clouds.
SIGNED LIMITED ISSUE — ONE OF 250 COPIES HANDBOUND BY EARLE GRAY, THIS NO. 155. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1970.
First edition, signed limited issue: one of 250 copies handbound in boards by Earle Gray, numbered and signed by the poet, this copy number 155 (the limitation number in red). Printed January 1970 in Santa Barbara by Noel Young for the Black Sparrow Press; design by Barbara Martin. Large octavo. 150 pp. Blue cloth spine with a cream paper label, illustrated paper-covered boards carrying Barbara Martin's cloud-painting design across both panels. Signed in black ink "Diane Wakoski" at the colophon. Very good; the blue cloth spine clean, the paper label bright and the lettering crisp.
Black Sparrow's first full-length collection by Diane Wakoski, gathering some fifty poems around the long title piece. The Magellanic clouds — the two satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way — give Wakoski a figure for the orbiting selves and absent lovers that drive the book: poems of longing, betrayal, and self-invention, written in the direct, incantatory, image-driven voice that became her signature. The collection belongs to the run of confessional, mythologizing work — composed between Inside the Blood Factory (1968) and The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems (1971) — that built her national reputation, fusing personal grievance and astronomical and elemental imagery into a sustained private mythology.
Per the colophon, the book was issued in just two states — 1,000 copies in paper wrappers and this 250-copy issue handbound in illustrated boards by Earle Gray and signed by the poet — making the handbound state itself the deluxe production.
SKU TO-2026-006
