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A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

Across a long writing and publishing life marked by experimentation with language and innovation in forms, Lorenzo Thomas was inconsistent in his usage when it came to matters of capitalization and punctuation (for example, his on-again off-again relationship to the lowly period), and he often used non-standard spellings. One has only to compare his poetry to his published prose to see that these were matters of conscious choice, not accidentals. Most of the poems in this edition were published more than once, and so we are able to see when Thomas chose to leave a poem as it was and when he chose to make an alteration. In our effort to honor Thomas’s methods of composition and editing, we have chosen as copy text the last version of the poem that appeared under the author’s supervision. In a very small number of cases we have made silent corrections to anomalies we were persuaded had not been intentional.