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 frontspsychic, 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
Explicitly playful and serious, generative and interpretive, Rachel Blau DuPlessiss Drafts are essential writing and reading. Catherine Daly, American Book Review
Drafts claims a place for women in the American epic. It redefines the genre's history component to include the social, family, sexuality and daily lifeas the Annales School has done for historiography in general. A thrilling achievement. Rosmarie Waldrop, author of The Nick of Time
DuPlessiss ongoing long poem is proving to be one of the major poetic achievements of our time. Ron Silliman, author of Against Conceptual Poetry
DuPlessis is after nothing less than a dolce stil nuovo for womens poetryone that is outside gender but indebted to the insights of the womens movements in which she participated. Maria Damon, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard 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
I admire [ DuPlessiss] ardor and integrity: her voice indicates suffering. With each gold drop the poetry progresses, doused by further experience. In her exploration of poetics, a rare cerebral intimacy forms as we are drawn into her schemata. Barbara Guest, author of The Red Gaze
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 cant ignore it. Charles Bernstein, author of Topsy-Turvy
