To claim that Diane Di Prima deserves more attention is a gross understatement. Poet, activist, scholar, publisher, translator, and teacher, Di Prima was intimately involved in some of the major literary and cultural movements of the second half of the 20th century, from the Beat and avant-garde scene in 1950s New York to the later 1960s California counterculture, and beyond. Fortunately, Calonne’s magisterial work <i>Diane Di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions</i>, the first book-length study that critically engages Di Prima and her writing, does an admirable job beginning to fill this void in the scholarship ... Calonne’s intellectual biography manages to be both an important sourcebook for scholars in the field as well as an engaging read for anyone interested in the intellectual development of this singular thinker.

European Journal of American Studies

What is made definitively clear by Calonne’s study is that there are many more publications by and about di Prima yet to come. Calonne has done a fine job delimiting areas of her work where arcane and occult source materials play a vital role.

Rain Taxi Review of Books

Much needed ... The impressive variety of events, sources, connections and literary achievements in di Prima’s career is interlaced with close readings of her lesser known and most famous works.

U.S. Studies Online

Di Prima not only deserves more recognition but wonderfully rewards it, and the greatest success of David Calonne’s informed book is to match the breadth and depth of her thought and work, capturing her unique mix of the esoteric and the street-level, and attracting more readers to her uplifting visionary poetics and undimmed political radicalism.

Veronique Lane, Senior Teaching Associate in French Studies, Lancaster University, UK

Reading David Calonne’s extraordinary study of Diane di Prima is to experience a true Renaissance mind in the body of a contemporary Italian-American woman. Taking readers from di Prima’s often brutal childhood to her current status as revered poet activist, Calonne maps the contours of a woman who bridged Beat poetics with Hippy politics, embraced the hermetic traditions of artistic and environmental renewal, engaged with genuine integrity numerous social justice programs, galvanized the second-wave feminist movement, and persistently revelled in the multi-media realities of 20th- and 21st-century art communities. Calonne’s book, a critical biography, testifies to the power of the imagination to create a life inseparable from art. It took far too long for a full-length study of di Prima to be written, so, many thanks to David Calonne for remedying that slight.

Nancy M. Grace, Virginia Myers Professor English (emerita), The College of Wooster, USA, and author of Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination (2007) and co-editor of Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (2002) and of The Transnational Beat Generation (2012)

Calonne’s book is a brilliant exploration of the core of di Prima’s work, taking in her engagement with some of the most significant literary traditions of modernity, including Ezra Pound’s new poetic languages and the visionary poetics of H.D., her reading of spirituality and eastern religions, and her role in the contemporary literary scene of America. This book is a long overdue academic appraisal of one of the most significant writers of her generation.

Polina Mackay, Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Nicosia, Cyprus, and Vice President, European Beat Studies Network

Calonne has written the first book-length critical study of Diane di Prima, one of America's greatest modern poets, and it is worthy of the large and enthusiastic readership she has inspired for over half a century. Seamlessly interweaving the legacies of the West and the East, di Prima observed, absorbed, and sometimes led the major cultural movements of the postwar U.S. from the Beat Generation to the feminist revolution. Contextualizing the poetry in her autobiographies, journals, lectures, and activism, Calonne explores the intellectual stringency, wit, and visionary pragmatism which distinguishes di Prima's art. Di Prima discovered early that ‘the dark was luminous. That much I KNEW,’ and now we know it too. A remarkable work of devoted scholarship.

Ann Douglas, Parr Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA, and author of Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920's (1995)