"Tony: Ending the Life," published in A Scattering of Salts, is an "expansive elegy for his friend" (Tony Parigory, who died in summer 1993 of AIDS), "and (it is all but explicit) himself." Merrill had been largely silent about his AIDS diagnosis but…
Holograph and typescript fragments toward and three full drafts of "Self-Portrait in a Tyvek Windbreaker." A play on John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," and published in A Scattering of Salts, it is one of the longest poems of…