Bill Mohr performs the monologue The Comedian as the Letter N, 2019.
Bill Mohr is a professor emeritus at California State University, Long Beach, where he has taught since 2006, after receiving his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego in 2004. In 2011, the University of Iowa Press published Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992. His reviews, articles, and commentary have also appeared in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry, Poetry Flash, Journal of Beat Studies, Chicago Review, William Carlos Williams Review, Poetry Project Newsletter, Hungry Mind Review, New Review of Literature, OR, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and Beyond Baroque NEW.
Mohr has a chapter on L.A. poetry forthcoming in a volume entitled “L.A.: A Literary History” from Cambridge University Press in 2026 as well as an essay forthcoming in a CUP volume celebrating the centenary of Allen Ginsberg’s birth. Prior to his career as an academic, Mohr made his living at various occupations, including working as a blueprint machine operator and typesetter. During this time, he was the editor and publisher of Momentum Press, which he founded in 1974 (www.koankinship.com)
In addition to being translated into Spanish, Italian, Croatian, and Japanese, Mohr’s poems have appeared in over 20 anthologies. Mohr’s most recent full-length collection of poems is a bilingual edition, The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana (What Books, Los Angeles, 2018). What Books will publish Remiges: Collected Longer Poems in the fall 2026.
Mohr has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute and been honored with Beyond Baroque’s George Drury Smith Award. His literary and editorial archives are at the Archive for New Poetry in the Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego.
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DISPLACEMENTS features two previously unpublished prose poems, as well as a monologue and a sermon. If the mutability of collage, as Alan Wald suggests, engenders the poetic logic of prose poems, Mohr's comic permissiveness tethers their unfamiliar juxtapositions with puckish vivacity. The other pair of pieces strike a more contumacious note in the narrator's refusal to reconcile himself to a specious fate. In each work the lift-off of each sentence pushes aside not only what has preceded it, but the recoil of what might yet happen.
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