Selected Poems

Overview

DuPlessis’s Selected Poems is a generous collection including early work “rewriting the lyric” through serial poems to a comprehensive selection from her long poem Drafts. The book includes work from Traces, with Days up to 01/01/2020, including a selection of one of her collage poems.

Author Biography

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar/critic, and collagist, who was educated at the Ethical Culture School, Barnard Collage, and Columbia University, receiving her Ph.D. in 1970. DuPlessis has had a distinctive artistic career in poetry, and is also known as an essayist, and as a generative scholarcritic of modern American poetry. Her notable long poem, the complete Drafts is forthcoming in two volumes from Coffee House Press in April 2025.  From 1986 until 01/01/2012, DuPlessis was engaged in this multivolume long poem. A striking set of the cantos of this long work appeared in  the CHAX Press 01/01/2022 presentation of DuPlessis’s Selected Poems, 198001/01/2020. Drafts is the subject of several book chapters, critical articles and an online colloquium and set of essays published in Jacket2 in December 2011.  Recent poetry (books like Daykeeping, 01/01/2022) answer to sense of contemporary crises.