The Pushcart Prize IV: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson. New York: Avon. $7.95.

This annual tribute to US "alternative publishing" enterprises, and those "as yet uncelebrated writers and editors" whose work sustains them, maintains a splendid balance among poets and prose writers, established and new. Already the Pushcart Prize itself is, as it says of the small presses it celebrates, "part of the literary mainstream."