Poetic Realism by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Poetic Realism by Rachel Blau DuPlessis is the fourth episode of the on-going work Traces, with Days. It is both a committed poetry looking out at the world in witness, resistance, and with a fervent vow to find “incantatory information” in an account of what is seen, felt, and thought. This is a responsive book, mixing the tiny person and the cosmos, entering a dialogue about the body politic, presenting commentary with a dissolve into uncertainty. She mixes the starkness of disaster with strange dreams of being and loss, and she negotiates inside the real with the tools of irreverence–and poetry. The book, deploying some odd genres, reveals DuPlessis’s characteristically serious wit and the challenge of her mix: “poetic realism.”

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is the author of the multivolume long poem Drafts (written between 1986 and 2012), of the recent collage poems NUMBERS (2018) and Graphic Novella (2015), and of this series of on-going book-length episodes alternating days and traces: Days and Works (2017), Late Work (2020), Around the Day in Eighty Worlds (2018), and Poetic Realism (2021). In her critical career, she has written extensively on gender, poetry and poetics; on objectivist poets (as well as editing The Selected Letters of George Oppen); and on modern and contemporary Anglophone poetry. She lives in Philadelphia.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet, critic, and collagist, is the author of the multi-volume long poem Drafts (1986-2012), from Salt Publishing and Wesleyan, now the subject of several critical studies. The book you are holding, Poetic Realism (2021) from the series Traces, with Days, joins Days and Works (Ahsahta Press, 2017), Late Work (Black Square Editions, 2020), and Around the Day in 80 Worlds (BlazeVOX, 2018)). In-print collage-poems are Graphic Novella (Xexoxial Editions, 2015) and NUMBERS (Materialist Press, 2018). Her Selected Poems 1980-2020 is forthcoming from CHAX in 2022. Books of her poetry have been translated into French and Italian. DuPlessis has published a number of critical books on gender and poetics, including the trilogy The Pink Guitar, Blue Studios, and Purple Passages. Other critical works include Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985) and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (2001). She has co-edited several anthologies and edited The Selected Letters of George Oppen. DuPlessis lives in Philadelphia.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 68 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-375-1

$16

Poetic Realism by Rachel Bl… by BlazeVOX [books]