The Complete Drafts

From experimental poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis comes a major work over three decades in the making: a long poem addressing the intimate and dynamic nature 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.