Bruce Boyd’s first book will be the most startling posthumous debut of any poet of the past century. Born in the late 1920s, in San Francisco, this quintessential West Coast maverick poet died without having had a single volume of poems published: not even a 16 page chapbook proffers his name on the title page. Letters & Poems, therefore, represents a massively overdue publication of a poet whose work appeared alongside the writing of Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, and Stuart Z. Perkoff in Donald Allen’s classic anthology, New American Poetry. This volume will  feature letters Boyd wrote to both Spicer and Snyder, as well as poems that appeared in such journals as Evergreen Review, Yugen, Measure, and Spicer’s legendary magazine, J. Boyd lived and wrote his poems in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Venice West, moving back and forth with an emblematic restlessness often associated with mid-century mendicant poets. Boyd's poems reveal a man who, even three-score years ago, regarded the concept of poetry as a literary career to be an absurd fabrication of the Western mindset. While Rimbaud may have renounced, he first aspired. Boyd, from the very start, dismissed such fantasies. Elusive as he was as a person, however, the themes of his poems point to the embodying value of an enduring vision, now finally if belatedly shared, and deserving of slow absorption and grateful celebration.

Bill Mohr, author of Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992