New York on Fire

Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1989. Paperback. 144p., beautifully designed and printed on alkaline paperstock and illustrated with a large number of vignette period photos and drawings; oversize softbound, 11x7.5 inch glossy black and red wraps. Two tiny corner-tips are bent, otherwise perfectly sound, clean and unmarked, a nice copy. Half-title has a scrawled inscription from Obenzinger, signed, and dated the year of publication. He works nonfiction into mild unorthodoxy with line-breaks --into modernist poetry in short that remains informative. Factual stuff organized by a poet. Commenced as a commercial project, write a book for a business concern, those who commissioned it went broke and Obenzinger re-fashioned his materials into this oddity endorsed by Dennis Smith, a notable writer on things (in)flamable, and by fellow poets Ishmael Reed, Andrei Codrescu and Eduardo Galeano.