This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958) Signed First Edition Reference

This Kind of Bird Flies Backward was Diane di Prima’s first major poetry collection, published in 1958 by Totem Press. The book established her as a distinctive voice within the Beat Generation — lyrical, sensual, and unapologetically female in a literary movement dominated by male energy and male friendship.

The Book

The poems are short, imagistic, and emotionally direct. Di Prima writes about love, sex, domesticity, and the bohemian life of lower Manhattan with a specificity that anchors abstract emotion in physical detail. The writing is less declamatory than Ginsberg’s, less spontaneous than Kerouac’s prose — more controlled, more attentive to the line as a unit of measure.

The title captures di Prima’s temperament: a refusal of expected direction, a contrarian independence that would characterize her entire career. Where the male Beats sought transcendence through speed and movement, di Prima’s early poems attend to the textures of daily life — meals, lovers, rooms, streets — with a grounded sensuality.

First Edition Identification

Publisher: Totem Press, New York Publication date: 1958 Format: Small paperback Print run: Very small (typical of Totem Press publications)

Signed Copy Market Values

• Signed first edition: $300–$800
• Inscribed copies: $400–$1,200
• Unsigned first edition: $100–$300

The scarcity of the Totem Press edition — a tiny print run from a small press that published briefly in the late 1950s — makes this one of the harder Beat-era first editions to find in any condition, let alone signed. Copies surface infrequently in the dealer market.