Revolutionary Letters
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Diane di Prima was a feminist Beat poet, born in Brooklyn, New York. Named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009, di Prima was awarded the National Poetry Association’s Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement, and received an honourary doctorate from St. Lawrence University. Di Prima published more than 40 books during her lifetime, including volumes of memoir, poetry and prose. Di Prima lived in northern California until her death in late 2020.
‘A powerful and ever-urgent call to action...one of di Prima’s best-known, most-loved collections of writing.’
Frieze
By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was at its inception, 50 years ago.
During the tumult of 1968, Beat poet Diane di Prima began writing her ‘letters’, poems filled with a potent blend of utopian anarchism and Zen-tinged ecological awareness that were circulated via underground newspapers and stapled pamphlets. First published in 1971 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in the US, di Prima would go on to publish four subsequent editions, expanding the collection each time. During the last years of her life, di Prima got to work on the final iteration of this lifelong project, collecting all of her previously published ‘letters’ and adding the new work, poems written from 2007 up to the time of her death in October 2020.
‘A pioneer in environmental awareness and body positivity and the fat acceptance movement; and she wasn’t afraid of calling herself a revolutionary... Her work seems ever more pressing and relevant—particularly her Revolutionary Letters.’
‘A writer who radically devoted herself to the experiential truth of beauty and intellect, in poverty and grace, in independent dignity, and in the community of Beat consciousness.’ — Thurston Moore
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Diane di Prima was a feminist Beat poet, born in Brooklyn, New York. Named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009, di Prima was awarded the National Poetry Association’s Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement, and received an honourary doctorate from St. Lawrence University. Di Prima published more than 40 books during her lifetime, including volumes of memoir, poetry and prose. Di Prima lived in northern California until her death in late 2020.