Edited by Bill Mohr.
Bruce Boyd’s first book, Toward Morning: Selected Poems, is the most startling posthumous debut of any poet of the past century. Toward Morning, therefore, represents a massively overdue publication of a poet whose work appeared alongside the writing of Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, and Stuart Z. Perkoff in such journals as Evergreen Review, Yugen, Measure, and Spicer’s legendary magazine, J. Boyd lived and wrote his poems in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Venice West, moving back and forth with an emblematic restlessness often associated with mid-century mendicant poets. Elusive as he was as a person, however, the themes of his poems point to the embodying value of an enduring vision, now finally if belatedly shared, and deserving of slow absorption and grateful celebration.
ISBN: 979-8-9926955-1-9
Pub. Date: April 15, 2026
Edited by Bill Mohr.
Bruce Boyd’s first book, Toward Morning: Selected Poems, is the most startling posthumous debut of any poet of the past century. Toward Morning, therefore, represents a massively overdue publication of a poet whose work appeared alongside the writing of Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, and Stuart Z. Perkoff in such journals as Evergreen Review, Yugen, Measure, and Spicer’s legendary magazine, J. Boyd lived and wrote his poems in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Venice West, moving back and forth with an emblematic restlessness often associated with mid-century mendicant poets. Elusive as he was as a person, however, the themes of his poems point to the embodying value of an enduring vision, now finally if belatedly shared, and deserving of slow absorption and grateful celebration.
ISBN: 979-8-9926955-1-9
Pub. Date: April 15, 2026
Born in San Francisco in 1928, Bruce Boyd was educated at UC Berkeley, where he met Jack Spicer. Boyd moved to Los Angeles in the early 1950s and was a founding member of Venice West. He moved back to San Francisco in 1958 and joined Robert Duncan’s workshop. By the late spring of 1960, he returned to Los Angeles in search of remunerative work. His poems and prose appeared in Evergreen Review, Yugen, and Floating Bear. He was one of the poets featured in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (1960). Known as the Zen poet of Venice West, his whereabouts after 1969 remain unknown and open to conjecture.
