Poetry by Anne Waldman
June 7, 2016 • 6 x 9 • 160 Pages • 978-1-56689-438-8
Waldman appropriates the idea of Blake’s unborn spirit of Thel to explore artists’ and activists’ roles during the Anthropocene.
Coming in the wake of her vast and magnificent epic (The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment), this volume brings Anne Waldman’s work into the more intimate, paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge. This should not suggest that Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born is a book of small things; it is anything but. Juxtaposing lyric arcana, journalism, critical fragments, visions of mythic and mystic beings, narrative, polemics, and even ekphrasis, Waldman has created a work that is simultaneously jeremiad and psalm. It is, then, both fearful and celebratory, an epic of a “time before birth.”
About the Author
Anne Waldman is the author of numerous volumes of poetry including the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy, Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment which won the USA Pen Center Award for Poetry in 2012. Other recent books include Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur, and Jaguar Harmonics, and the anthology CROSS WORLDS: Transcultural Poetics (Coffee House Press 2014, co-edited with Laura Wright). She is a recipient of the Shelley Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She has been at the forefront of cultural activism, and one of the founders of the Poetry Project at St Marks Church In-the-Bowery and a co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, the first Buddhist-inspired University in the west. Her work has been published, most recently in French and Finnish.