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14 pp. (8vo), original printed wrappers, stapled. Limited to 100 copies, of which the author reportedly destroyed 60. First Edition.

First edition of the rare first book by important American novelist John Hawkes, a collection of verse printed at his own expense while a student at Harvard. 

In an interview with Bradford Morrow in Conjunctions, Hawkes noted, "I didn't know anything about poetry. When I went to Harvard in the summer of 1943, I took my poems to Robert Hillyer. He picked twelve or fourteen from a hundred, I think, and I had them privately printed. That's as far as my poetry went." In another interview, he expanded, "A lot of these poems reflected romantic notions about the war; I certainly thought I was probably going to be killed in the war, and I had the same romantic sensibility of some of the World War I poets -Wilfred Owen or Rupert Brooke. So I had these dreadful poems printed. Long after the war, I tried to destroy them by throwing them down the incinerator near our apartment in New York, but my mother luckily saved about fifty of them."