“Awork of epic vision” reflecting our fraught contemporary moment of racial and gendered hatred, mass migration, global war, and terror (New York Journal of Books). Waldman appropriates the idea of William Blake’s unborn spirit of Thel to explore artists’ and activists’ roles during the Anthropocene. “Throughout, these long poems alternate between verse and prose, Eastern and Western philosophy, spiritual channeling and focused critique” (Publishers Weekly). “Juxtaposing lyric arcana, journalism, critical fragments, visions of mythic and mystic beings, narrative, polemics, and even ekphrasis, Waldman has created a work that is simultaneously jeremiad and psalm. It is, then, both fearful and celebratory, an epic of a ‘time before birth’” (Lyn Hejinian). Profoundly resonant, essential, and impassioned, Waldman’s latest work deserves to be read aloud to appreciate its deepest waters.
