New York: Bernadette Mayer's first book. Published at only 23 years old, by 0 to 9, the press and poetry journal she edited with Vito Acconci. 

In “A Lecture at the Naropa Institute, 1989,” Mayer recalls:

"The way it came into being was I wrote a story that was about falling down, tripping and falling down. It was nicely written, experimentally so, but it seemed dull. So I tried to figure out what to do with it; and being a twenty-year-old person at the time, I went overboard and made a structure that is like a diamond shape where I accumulated other texts … then I accumulated some lists from the dictionary of other words for beginning, middle and end … I decided to interrupt the text at random moments with all the words I could think of that would mean story … The confluences were amazing." (From A Secret Location website)