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Bomb

Gregory Corso. 

 

City Lights: 1958. First edition, first issue. Single sheet folded into a pamphlet. Signed on the cover. Tear on the bottom of the front wrap. Mild soiling on the wraps beside the slight fold that runs down the spine. Unpaginated. Good. Signed. 

 

You could call this the break up edition, since after Bomb offended Lawrence Ferlinghetti and incited a student riot at Oxford, City Lights cut Corso loose. Here is the only signed first printing around. Think about what the footloose Corso felt as he signed it.  

 

                     "O Bomb thy BOOM His tomb

              That I lean forward on a desk of science

              an astrologer dabbling in dragon prose

      half-smart about wars bombs especially bombs

     That I am unable to hate what is necessary to love

              That I can't exist in a world that consents

       a child in a park a man dying in an electric-chair

                That I am able to laugh at all things

      all that I know and do not know thus to conceal my pain

         That I say I am a poet and therefore love all man

 knowing my words to be the acquainted prophecy of all men

           and my unwords no less an acquaintanceship"

    $360.00Price

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