Advance praise for Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition: "With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime (through a prism). Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. In her classic poem 'Rant' (Revolutionary Letter #75) she describes this mindset as 'a multidimensional chess / which is divination / & strategy'. This time reading through I was reminded of Baraka's Wise, Why's, Y's and Ginsberg's The Fall of America. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters. These poems are not realized until we are called upon to act."-Cedar Sigo "How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. They remind you that you are a part of something, that as sure as you have enemies who want things like jobs, you have friends who want everything. The new letters in this expanded edition continue di Prima's tradition of telling you things you need to know-like 'you have only / so much / ammunition' & how a poem can matter as 'the memory / of the poem / tak[es] root in / thousands / of minds.' & here you thought this classic couldn't get any better."-Wendy Trevino "Revolutionary Letters are action philosophy on the road to soul-building, to our realized mammal-hood, and to our humanity ... di Prima's imagination and inspiration cause these poems to become more brilliant with the passage of time, and with the growing number of more recent Letters water-falling over the lip of what we think is possible"-Michael McClure "[To read] di Prima's Revolutionary Letters-begun in 1968 in a spirit of utopian hope and ecological terror-is to enter the intimate moral consciousness of a writer who acted where many simply just thought. 'These are transitional years and the dues / will be heavy,' she writes in 'Revolutionary Letter 10.' 'The continent is a seed.' All this before Monsanto existed. By letter 102, her tone has changed, her technology updated: 'Soon the only ones / who'll know how to find us / will be Google / & those small surveillance drones.'"-John Freeman

Book Information
ISBN 9780872868793
Author Diane di Prima
Format Hardback
Page Count 216
Imprint City Lights Books
Publisher City Lights Books