The Complete Drafts

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From experimental poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis comes a major work over three decades in the making: a long poem addressing the intimate and dynamicnature of poetry, culture, and life.

The Complete Drafts comprises 114 endlessly innovative cantos engaging the poet's life and our times. Saturated with polyphonic responses to the historical and artistic sweep of the 20th and 21st centuries, all emotions are double and conflicting: wonder and bedazzlement at the world alongside grief for what we have made of it.

Transcendent and ethically inquisitive at once, The Complete Drafts is an urgent contemporary long poem of hope, critique, resistance, and melos.

Reviews

Praise for The Complete Drafts

"With recourse to an astonishing range of techniques and material devices, formal concern as inclination and qualm, these poems register, lament, react to and wrestle with erosions on multiple fronts--psychic, social, historical, somatic....They affirm and negate the toll history takes on letter and spirit, affirming and negating and navigating a way between." --Nathaniel Mackey, National Book Award-winning author of Splay Anthem

"Drafts is a raucous reperforming of the epic as long poems including histories. This work is a monument, albeit anti-monumental, of contemporary North American poetry. You can try to go around it, or turn back, but you can't ignore it." --Charles Bernstein, author of Topsy-Turvy

"DuPlessis' ongoing long poem is proving to be one of the major poetic achievements of our time." --Ron Silliman, author of Against Conceptual Poetry

"One of the most ambitious undertakings by an American poet, Drafts is a courageous and witty struggle to open modernism up to feminism, or, more broadly, to imagine how a truly ethical culture might sound." --Bob Perelman, author of Jack and Jill in Troy

"DuPlessis reinforces the subversive possibilities of modernist/projectivist field poetics by approaching page space as a register of the social dynamics, including the gender dynamics, of marginalization." --Lynn Keller, author of Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women

"It is a syncretistic passion for threading social criticality with linguistic sonic virtuosity that makes Blau DuPlessis' poetics a luminous beacon for poets of the future." --Rodrigo Toscano, author of Deck of Deeds

"Explicitly playful and serious, generative, and interpretive, Rachel Blau DuPlessis' Drafts are essential writing and reading." --Catherine Daly, American Book Review

"DuPlessis has created one of the most sustained and magnificent meditations written by a contemporary poet on loss, presence, and the haunting persistence of language to redeem what has vanished." --Patrick Pritchett, Jacket2

"Rachel Blau DuPlessis does what all good poets must do: she crosses, and indeed transcends, boundaries. She has a masterful feel for form and her ear can be astonishing. Her visual imagination is rich and her capacity for wordplay is considerable." --Robert Long, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Author Bio

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar, critic, and collagist. Her work includes the notable long poem Drafts (1986-2012), related historical-serial books such as Daykeeping (2023), and collage poems. As a poet-critic she has written extensively on gender, modern and contemporary poetry, and both feminist and objectivist poetics, with special attention to H.D., Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Barbara Guest, and George Oppen.