Poetry and Its Cultural Work
"These contemplations from the work site DuPlessis calls the blue studio are documents of a major career. By turns--and sometimes all at once--autobiographical, critical, cultural, ethical, and poetic, they evoke, probe, read, think, and enact the making that is poesis. This is amazing, engaging, and important work."--Dee Morris, John C. Gerber Professor of English, University of Iowa "Over the years DuPlessis has patiently explained the centrality of female poets and their feminism to the innovative tradition. In this stunning new collection she charts how she became a feminist critic (an essay that should be required reading) and challenges the continuing gendered assumptions of early 21st century poetries."--Juliana Spahr, author of Everybody's Autonomy "Blue Studios is an intriguing defense of 'affective reading, ' a defense and demonstration of some adventurous and nonstandard modes of essay-writing, and a suggestion of a kind of utopian horizon for poetry/poetics. A major collection by one of the most important poets and critics writing today, it is a proper (and improper) successor to The Pink Guitar."--Hank Lazer, coeditor, Modern and Contemporary Poetics
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, critic, and Professor of English at Temple University. She is the author/editor of more than 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, including The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934.