Meditations in an Emergency
Frank O’Hara
New York, 1957
 
O’Hara is the poet patron saint for Modern tortured souls from Madison Avenue to Main Street. 
 
First trade edition of his first full-length collection of poems. One of 900 copies. Original publisher's stiff wraps. Trivial hints of toning along the extremities, else Fine - appears virtually unread. A true rarity as such. 
 
‘Frank O’Hara invented a form of poetry about the instant communication of overwhelming experience. He captures life’s excruciating immediacies so directly that they flow and flood into his reader, like an interpersonal nervous system...Like cells firing impulses across synapses, the poems seem unfiltered biorhythms, transmitting desires, daydreams, impulses, emotions, associations, and perceptions as they happen, granting intimate access to a multifarious Frank O’Hara, that would be the envy of Walt Whitman, that other American avatar of conflicted multitudes. Reading him, we seem to live under his very skin, what poet and critic Trace Peterson, calls O’Hara’s “way of inhabiting poems that makes everything possible.”’(Keane)