I was already feeling the weight of my responsibility to encapsulate the work of, and this work by, a titan of poetry, poetics, and criticism whose vast and various writings I’ve been poring over for decades, and then I read Blazes and my task became more daunting. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s latest and final collection of poems, collages, and prose meditations on time, art, death, and memory is the set of wayfinding marks and bright fires that its title suggests. Situated between the rigid days and the fleeting “traces” of our lives that we fight to retain in light and in spite of how “dawns regularly dawn / beyond you,” Blazes evinces a furious mind grasping at sense with the perilous syntax that DuPlessis has spent her career so beautifully engaging and upending.
—Kate Colby
In her new book Rachel Blau DuPlessis offers contending renditions of what Samuel Beckett might call “how it is.” We find ourselves between enduring evidence of lives once lived, the trace, and the transfiguring oblivion of the brilliance to come, the blaze. But always amid a wealth of words. DuPlessis has long drawn forth immense thoughts from the slightest sounds. Here, elegantly, extravagantly, she celebrates the world-making power of letters. An abecedarium is broken into clusters and scattered through the pages, like seeds in the orchard that is Pardes. A series of extraordinary prose poems offers analytical exaltations of common things, photographs, phrases, flash floods . . . as avowedly secular as DuPlessis is, were there in fact a Divine creator, He or She would be reading this book right now to be reminded that a life lived in Creation, amid intelligence and travail, grief, loss, ecstasy and rage, is nonetheless a wonder. The concluding poem “Psalm 151” (and the dazzling addendum, “Blaze-mends in Gold”) is a profound act of gnostic devotion, a living through, shard after shard, of the breaking of the vessels, that primordial catastrophe regarding which DuPlessis has done, is doing, her agnostic part to redeem.
—Joseph Donahue
The last in a series of six books tracking the derangement of the last decade or so, Blazes a is deft and brilliant testimony to words’ power to confront and reshape the reality from which they arise. I am in awe of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s verbal gift. In poem after poem she expresses the problem of being here at all in happenstance always beyond reach. One long poem, “Psalm 151”, is a fabulous riff on Lurianic Kabbalah; another, “The Way Things Currently Are,” is the best description of the intellectual dilemma of our present American moment that I have read. The book pivots around the gradually emerging ideas of “traces” and “days” to grapple with the impossibility of our being in time, with language as our only viewing window. “All structures I might invent are aspects of this riddle, this puzzle of time. These things, the res or rays, I have recorded. Why? To grasp a cornered scrap.”
—Norman Fischer
If then. Our world is a war. Where is our necessary angel? In Blazes, DuPlessis traces a path we might follow through this “bad era,” in turns assembling and dissolving, cutting and grafting. What now? Turning her scholar poet’s eye to the America we know now, DuPlessis fits form to memory and flicker to force. Gleaning.
—Susan Howe
See Interstices by Rachel Blau DuPlessiss, also a Subpress book.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar/critic, and collagist whose notable long poem The Complete Drafts was published by Coffee House Press (2025); it is conceptualized as an excessive and wide-ranging work of socio-poesis within an ethical aesthetics. In addition, CHAX Press brought out her Selected Poems 1980-2020 (2022).
Her books of collage poems join texts—aphorism, ruminations, and meditative writing—with visual work in unique ensembles. Secular Ex Votos, Life in Handkerchiefs, NUMBERS, Churning the Ocean of Milk, and Graphic Novella interpret contemporary life with visual panache, textual documentary, and wit.
In her career as a poet-critic, DuPlessis has written extensively on gender, poetry and poetics, including a classic trilogy The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice; Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work; and Purple Passages, investigating the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry.
In a grouping of six recent books, she faces the recent past with a fierce poetic response. Among these books are Late Work, Around the Day in 80 Worlds, Poetic Realism, and Daykeeping. The book Blazes caps this series of synoptic books from 2015-2026.
Her considerable critical work on Objectivist poetry and poetics includes her pioneering edition of The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Among her several awards are a residency at Bellagio, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a year at the National Humanities Center. Poetry by DuPlessis in translation includes books in French, Italian and Russian, and individual works and chapbooks appearing in German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Her website is www.rachelblauduplessis.net; all 114/115 individual cantos in Drafts are available read by the author at www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/DuPlessis.php
She is Emerita Professor at Temple University.
Leave a Reply