Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition: Pocket Poets Series No. 27

by Diane di Prima

Book Overview

Expanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals on the one-year anniversary of her passing.

By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was fifty years...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872868796
• ISBN13: 9780872868793
• Release Date: September 2021
• Publisher: City Lights Books
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.9" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

"All love is revolution"

Ranging from cutting political literalness to heart-bending humanness, these letters comprise a solid coming-of-age volume. Their greatest power comes from a question that recurs in different forms throughout: Why Not? Why not stop driving and plant flowers in cars? Why not love like crazy? Why not live your visions? Even though I now more frequently read the likes of Mary Oliver, it is this spirit of *everything as raw potential* that I so admire in Di Prima. It is definitely a timepiece, infused with the energy of a 1960's-formed consciousness (that speaks against nuclear weapons, deforestation, police brutality, capitalism, and of course touts revolution, with touches of eastern philosophy), but a timepiece that stands vibrant. The issues Di Prima addresses are still relevant today, though it is harder to see them through the eyes of clear hope with which she writes. But again, therein lies her power. Additionally, as one of the few published female poets emerging with the beatniks, I think it is important to give her lines a read. Yes, she can pound out that characteristic beatnik rant (though she never goes on to the extent of Ginsberg), but she can also sing a soft pulse that de-cynifies the imagination, reminds us of the dream at the heart of dreams, and revels in Life.