Publisher's Synopsis
Poetry. One of our greatest and most consummate poets, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, offers 80 poems in this collection, closely observing her Self and the planet she inhabits. She asks urgent existential questions 'what life actually is, with anything called / oneself in it, ' and she openly expresses her outrage and fury at the current state of the planet. To a 'quotidian apocalypse, ' she responds with, I didn't count / on having to deploy this phrase / so soon.' There is an irresistible amalgamation of humor and alarm on these finely designed pages. Remarkably well-intentioned, DuPlessis is always spot on.--Anne Tardos
Around each day, she flies her rounds--tempestuous. DuPlessis revels in travel and records what unravels in one's habits of attention when all the elsewheres return us to a home we are about to lose. 'What is the true story of any time? / any itinerary? / and of its travelling sorrows?' The poems resemble conversations that rise and set, on long journeys, in turns light or rueful, bright or bruised: monologues that trail the trails. The reader listens in, chimes up, takes a draught, like a fellow traveller hurtling and hurting on a tour through the end times. Disarmingly candid, these verses and prose forays document the dread and slow-inching surprise of a terrible lesson--at this catastrophe, we are the sudden turn; at this catastrophe, the earth is overturned every single day. And yet, DuPlessis also remembers to collect the ribbons of sunlight and the laughter she trips upon, through these journeys. I encounter so many moments of startling honesty--each poem is a face as pert as day and as wild as night, looking up, from a labyrinth of drafts.--Divya Victor Of the worlds we pass through in a day, 80 shine forth here, in the pages of a pilgrim, a meta-Basho with a meta-notebook, who is by turns hilarious, somber, meditative, grieving, charming, and almost effortlessly profound. The 80 worlds are in fact one world, in that an end is coming to them all. (Every day a fresh apocalypse!) Not in a hurry but mindful of time, DuPlessis shares what she sees (earthquakes, fascist rallies, Mt. Fuji) and what she so acutely hears, in heart, in mind, in emails from friends. While taking us through the 80 or 80,000 sights and sounds of a life, she guides us as well through her own deep disquiet, a disquiet that turns out to be both an anxious and an exhilarating place to be. Page after page we travel with her, in the warmth of her company, amid colliding moments and 'marvelous concurrences.'--Joseph Donahue
