Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born

Coming in the wake of her vast and magnificent epic ( The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment ), this volume brings Anne Waldman's work into the more intimate, paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge. This should not suggest that Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born is a book of small things; it is anything but. 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.' Praise for Anne Waldman: "Waldman brings her wild, oracular voice to the environmental questions that currently bedevil us." —Booklist From "Citadels Thel Leaves Ringing": We got to Mars. We circle asteroids with a strange anticipation. We go interstellar. We like the sound of wormhole. Its magic. Thel without footprint, without trace, desiccated, desolate, nothing around, nugatory. Thel who talks with worm. Thel a figment in the mind of becoming-in-life, of potential, of not-becoming-yet in-mind, just got dreamed up, a proposal is Thel's gambit for one who would be cautious. Caution trumps curious. “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. "A work 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.