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by Anne Waldman
From "one of the most important and irreducible living American poets" (Poetry Foundation) comes a powerful and prophetic collection of epic scope and vision.
Mesopotopia explores the vast sweep of our accelerating, precipitous world. From the cradle to the grave, from the mysterious poetic origins of Mesopotamia to our own dystopias of the twenty-first century, Anne Waldman crafts a singular, radical investigation into the syncretic layers of quantum space and dreamtime. She invokes "studying" as the most compelling ritual and tool for evolution and travels to various fellaheen worlds, treading metabolic pathways and ancient "antitheses realities," and gleans sacred texts that speak urgently through the transports and telepathies of poetry. Troubadour dawn songs, pyramid texts, Buddhist mantras, canonical hours of Judeo-Christian tradition, Persian prayers, Druid sorcery, and the wild, gnarly syntax and modal structure of Waldman's particular performative passion and wit are all conjured here.
What emerges is a meditation on the salient words of the French poet Antonin Artaud contemplating the destruction and rubble post–World War II: "We are not yet born, we are not yet in the world, there is not yet a world, things have not been made, the reason for being has not yet been found." Mesopotopia—mythic maelstrom, rhythmic rite of passage, protolanguage trance dance—moves toward release and gnosis.
"To understand the radiance of the poetry world you have to look at Anne. In Mesopotopia I'm struck by the fact she is such a good writer, her tone so rich & embodied, so frank you could hang anything on it and she does—in a moment when nobody knows what to do Anne extends us this canny oracular, a streaming prayer cobbled from every direction – in a grown up in NYC way, Mesopotopia is today's lucky read, gorgeous and full." —Eileen Myles, author of A Working Life
"The poem as an archive of histories and myths, an outlet for political rage, an inscape of universal compassion, a score for performance, an account of things touched and seen and dreamed, an atlas of the natural world, the language of a tribe: for sixty years, Anne Waldman has been taking us to what poetry was meant to be." —Eliot Weinberger, author of The Life of Tu Fu
"Anne Waldman's Mesopotopia unfolds in layered, palimpsestic compositions, forming potent murmurations of language: coordinated, shape-shifting, and spectacular. With an epic vision, these poems address complex themes, dreaming and unraveling threads of history and myth. It's an enveloping performance, an urgent invocation. An utterly astonishing collection." —Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
This information about Mesopotopia was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Anne Waldman is a revered poet, performer, professor, editor, and cultural activist. She is the author of more than forty-five books, including Gossamurmur, Manatee/Humanity, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy, which won the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. The recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Before Columbus Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, Waldman makes her home in New York City and in Boulder, Colorado, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Writing and Poetics and artistic director of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University.
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