The Vermont Notebook by John Ashbery and Joe Brainard

A 1975 collaboration between the poet John Ashbery and painter Joe Brainard, who wrote the wonderful book I Remember.


Ashbery's prose poems, largely comprised of long and short lists and made-up diary entries, are accompanied with pen and ink drawings by Brainard.

The drawings bring out the beauty in simplistic, mundane objects such as a cup of coffee,

Or a toilet,

Or a letter.

The original 1975 Black Sparrow Press edition was long out of print, but Granary Books reissued it in 2001, happily.