The poems in this pocket companion to Zdanys' Collected Poems 1970-2020 were written between the summer of 1966 and the winter of 1969, when he was a high school student and a freshman in college. They mark the beginning of a number of continuing thematic commitments and explorations that have found differing voices, structures, and expressions over the past fifty years in his acclaimed literary work. They are a valuable and revealing look at the springboard of his poetic career.