THE FLEA MARKET IN KIEL by LEWIS WARSH

41. THE FLEA MARKET IN KIEL. Tuscaloosa, AL: A Rest Books, 2006. 5¼x7" 24 pages. (P)

Letterpress, pamphlet-sewn hardcover. Designed and printed by Patrick Masterson in an edition of 350 copies, of which 50 have been bound in boards by hand, numbered and signed by the author. The typeface is Chaparral Pro; the papers are Khadi, French, Hahnehühle Bugra, and Mohawk Superfine. Blue endpapers. Wrapped in protective handmade paper box. 

“Kiel, a small city in Northern Germany, on the North Sea. You can look out over the North Sea and there’s Denmark in the distance. I was there with Wang Ping, summer of 1993, to visit her sister. On Sunday morning we toured a huge flea market. That’s it. The flicker of a memory—I can see it all now. The title has little to do with the rest of the poem, which is divided into 17 parts, but it’s a kind of marker, or reference point, that gives the poem (at least) some personal meaning. And there was something that resembled a flea market about the way the different sections of the poems interacted with one another, or didn’t. There was something random about the connections between these poems. Some of them don’t work on their own but blend in as part of the whole. I wrote it in Manhattan (c. 2003).” LW