Poems by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

May 20, 2025 • 6 x 9 • 984 pages • 9781566897235

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.

About the Author

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar, critic, and collagist. Her work includes the notable long poem Drafts (1986-2012), related historical-serial books such as Daykeeping (2023), and collage poems. As a poet-critic she has written extensively on gender, modern and contemporary poetry, and both feminist and objectivist poetics, with special attention to H.D., Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Barbara Guest, and George Oppen.

Praise for The Complete Drafts

“With recourse to an astonishing range of techniques and material devices, formal concern as inclination and qualm, these poems register, lament, react to and wrestle with erosions on multiple fronts—psychic, social, historical, somatic….They affirm and negate the toll history takes on letter and spirit, affirming and negating and navigating a way between.” —Nathaniel Mackey, National Book Award-winning author of Splay Anthem

“Explicitly playful and serious, generative, and interpretive, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts are essential writing and reading.” —Catherine Daly, American Book Review

“Drafts claims a place for women in the American epic. It redefines the genre's history component to include the social, family, sexuality and daily life—as the Annales School has done for historiography in general. A thrilling achievement.” —Rosmarie Waldrop, author of The Nick of Time

“DuPlessis’s ongoing long poem is proving to be one of the major poetic achievements of our time.” —Ron Silliman, author of Against Conceptual Poetry

“DuPlessis is after nothing less than a ‘dolce stil nuovo’ for ‘women’s poetry’—one that is ‘outside gender’ but indebted to the insights of the women’s movements in which she participated.” —Maria Damon, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry

“One of the most ambitious undertakings by an American poet, Drafts is a courageous and witty struggle to open modernism up to feminism, or, more broadly, to imagine how a truly ethical culture might sound.” —Bob Perelman, author of Jack and Jill in Troy

“DuPlessis reinforces the subversive possibilities of modernist/projectivist field poetics by approaching page space as a register of the social dynamics, including the gender dynamics, of marginalization.” —Lynn Keller, author of Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women

“I admire [DuPlessis’s] ardor and integrity: her voice indicates suffering. With each gold drop the poetry progresses, doused by further experience. In her exploration of poetics, a rare cerebral intimacy forms as we are drawn into her schemata.” —Barbara Guest, author of The Red Gaze

“[DuPlessis develops] forms of writing that are wide and sophisticated enough to question the assumptions of deconstruction at its breaking-point with feminism, hence in developing a practice and critique utilizing arguments from both movements while remaining resolutely at their vanguard.” —Caroline Bergvall, author of Alisoun Sings

“Drafts is a raucous reperforming of the epic as long poems including histories. This work is a monument, albeit anti-monumental, of contemporary North American poetry. You can try to go around it, or turn back, but you can’t ignore it.” —Charles Bernstein, author of Topsy-Turvy

“It is a syncretistic passion for threading social criticality with linguistic sonic virtuosity that makes Blau DuPlessis’s poetics a luminous beacon for poets of the future.” —Rodrigo Toscano, author of Deck of Deeds

“DuPlessis has created one of the most sustained and magnificent meditations written by a contemporary poet on loss, presence, and the haunting persistence of language to redeem what has vanished.” —Patrick Pritchett, Jacket2

“Rachel Blau DuPlessis does what all good poets must do: she crosses, and indeed transcends, boundaries. She has a masterful feel for form and her ear can be astonishing. Her visual imagination is rich and her capacity for wordplay is considerable.” —Robert Long, The Philadelphia Inquirer