Books by Dr Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Transcending poetic schools and binaries in poetics with an odic verve and analytic intensity, Surge is the provocative, open-ended ending to Drafts, DuPlessis's twenty-six year project in the long poem.

Pitch is a skeptical monument, tracking an encounter with an edge we might pitch over, with the pitch dark of our time, with our lurching desires to do the necessary work of seeing and understanding. This book manifests one of the more distinctive ethical-aesthetic practices in contemporary poetry.

Twisted, knotted, struck by events and emotions at our historical moment, these Drafts register and produce torques - exaltation and tension, torsion and force, in their symphonic and bantering surges. This book continues the long poem project that Ron Silliman calls "one of the major poetic achievements of our time."

Since 1986, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been writing a long poem in canto-like sections, grouped in nineteen units. The individual poems fold over each other, using repeated elements to construct a sense of memory and traces or reminders of prior statements. Their themes involve history, gender, mourning and hope, all in "socio-twisty" language.

The Collage Poems of Drafts are two sequenced works for reading and looking that move back and forth across the porous border between language and image. These mixed media constructions join the whole long poem project by DuPlessis with a particular flair for juxtaposition and evocativeness beyond and within language.