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Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition
Pocket Poets Series No. 27
Series: City Lights Pocket Poets Series
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Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition
$5200
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?
Expanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic of eco-feminist-Zen Beat poetry, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals on the one-year anniversary of her passing.
- Galleys are available upon request
- Co-op is available
- Pursuing reviews and profiles in major print and online media.
- Pursuing excerpts in all major publications including The New Yorker, Harper's, New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, Paris Review, The Nation, and more.Β
- Forthcoming feature on Fence Booksβ web site.
- Pursuing profiles about Diane in major publications like TIME, People, Rolling Stone, and more mainstream magazines.Β
- Scheduling a big tribute event upon the book's release. The event will also celebrate di Primaβs Spring and Autumn Annals, published simultaneously by City Lights.
- Promotion via City Lights social media accounts. Weβll have well-known poets and writers read from the book, sharing on our Instagram account and their own.
- Endorsements already received from Hanif Abdurraqib, Ken Chen, Wendy Trevino, and Cedar Sigo. Natalie Diaz will be sending one to us, as well.
Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and
still learning, it may not be perfect - your
feedback is welcome!
Description
Expanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic of eco-feminist-Zen Beat poetry, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals on the one-year anniversary of her passing.
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. In 1971, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the first collection of these poems in his iconic Pocket Poets Series, and 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. Published in a board-bound edition that proudly features the original edition's cover art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Praise for Revolutionary Letters, 50th Anniversary Edition:
"There is a generosity and affection in Revolutionary Letters that I find myself returning to, always, when I'm at my most cynical and feeling lost for any understanding of what a better world might look like. When I need to be grounded and re-centred in my understanding of community care as a living, breathing, full-time mission. And, quite simply, when I need to be reminded of how language can begin on the page, and echo far beyond." - Hanif Abdurraqib
"What's astonishing about Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters is how these poems are adamantly useful. A manual of insurgent instruction, these poems tell you how to mitigate tear gas and sleep deprivation, eat a healthy diet, and overthrow the state. This book is ever more urgent in our moment, as a resurgent left faces down the apocalypse. Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future." - Ken Chen
"With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime. Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters. These poems are not realised until we are called upon to act." - Cedar Sigo
"How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. And here you thought this classic couldn't get any better." - Wendy Trevino
Series: City Lights Pocket Poets Series
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Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition
Expanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic of eco-feminist-Zen Beat poetry, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals on the one-year anniversary of her passing. 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...Hardback$5200Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
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Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?
The 50th Anniversary Edition of Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima is celebrated for its enduring relevance and powerful call to action. Reviewers praise its ability to resonate with contemporary social and political issues, combining radical imagination with practical guidance for activism. The collection offers insight into di Prima's evolving perspectives on various global challenges, from imperialism and consumerism to environmental degradation. Many find her work both inspirational and instructive, ensuring it remains vital to new generations seeking change.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780872868793
Publisher: City Lights Books
Format: Hardback
Date Published: 11 November 2021
Country: United States
Imprint: City Lights Books
Illustration: Illustrations
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 120.0mm
Height: 158.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 216
About the Author
Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968.
Di Prima's poetry mixes stream-of-consciousness with attention to form and joins politics to spiritual practice. In an interview with Jacket magazine, di Prima spoke about her life as a writer, a mother, and an activist. "I wanted everything-very earnestly and totally-I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body, and that meant that I wanted to be mother.... So my feeling was, 'Well'-as I had many times had the feeling-'Well, nobody's done it quite this way before but fuck it, that's what I'm doing, I'm going to risk it.'"
Di Prima had published more than 40 books. Her poetry collections include This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards (1958), Revolutionary Letters (1971, expanded 2021), the long poem ;Loba (1978, expanded 1998), and Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems (2001). She is also the author of the short story collection Dinners and Nightmares (1960), the semi-autobiographical Memoirs of a Beatnik (1968), and the memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (2001).
With Amiri Baraka, she co-edited the literary magazine The Floating Bear from 1961 to 1969. She co-founded the Poets Press and the New York Poets Theatre and founded Eidolon Editions and the Poets Institute. A follower of Buddhism, she also co-founded the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts.
Di Prima was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She has been awarded the National Poetry Association's Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and had also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis Foundation, and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence University granted her an honorary doctorate.
She had taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and in the Masters-in-Poetics program at the New College of California. Selections of her papers are held at the University of Louisville, Indiana University, Southern Illinois University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's libraries. Di Prima lived in Northern California.
She passed away on October 25th, 2020.
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