Anne Waldman

A fascinating new work from an internationally renowned poetAnne Waldmans new investigative hybrid-poem explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power. The poem asks questions as well as urges further engagement with the endangered (including our human selves). Part performance litany, part survival kit, part worried mammalian soundings, Waldman explores, as ever, what it means to inhabit our condition through language and imagination inside a wheel of time. This is the mature work of a philosophical field poet with a shamanic metabolism.

In this second tome, Iovis Book II, Anne Waldman pursues the duty she charged herself with at the close of her previous volume - "to blunt the knife." Male war making and aggression, old stubborn patriarchal social forms, and the damages of industrial and military expansionism raise the poet into a rage of spiritual compassion. All require that she conjure powerful mythic assistance. She summons female eidolons for her work, reaching out to Sappho, H.D., the woman troubador known as the Countess of Dia, the Gaelic Hag of Beare, and the Spider Woman of Native America. There are dirges for dead relatives and companions, and songs of healing as she watches over dear friends taken ill. All of Waldman's themes come into focus - friendship, motherhood, politics, and Buddhist wisdom. And the planet's charged landscapes appear - beyond North America looms tantric India, indigenous Mexico, old Europe - dreamscapes and visions as the poet takes on in succession the roles of daughter, lover, mother, hag. This is epic poetry that goes beyond the old injunction "to include history" - its effort is to change history.

Vow to Poetry is a trumpet call from our most iconoclastic poet that tears down the walls of prescribed creative processes. This stimulating mix of autobiography, interviews, and essays reveals a life possessed by the muse. You've seen the "safe" versions, now comes this unconventional, irreverent, transgressive volume.

The Stupa of Borobudur in Java is one of the architectural wonders of the world, designed as both a mandala and as an aid for the Buddhist pilgrim that can be read as a holy book. It has inspired Anne Waldman to create a work which is at once a walking meditation, a "cultural intervention," a "recovery" of a sacred site, and a take on contemporary reality and how the busy "monkey brain" (as it is called in Buddhism) works and travels. Exploratory and meditative, even playful at times, it expands the sense of invocation and incantation that Waldman is celebrated for, while also reflecting an engaged political/cultural awareness.

Presents a narrative poem about identity and time travel in which an imposter spirit is held in a metaphorical prison by Deciders who threaten the future of imagination and poetry.

""Polemics" is a series of brilliant metapolitical reflections, demolishing established opinion and dominant propaganda, and reorienting our understanding of events from the Kosovo and Iraq wars to the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution. With critical insight and polemical skill, Badiou considers how language becomes judgment, which judgments form opinion, how opinions harden into propaganda, and which propaganda becomes the dominant power. With wit and profundity, Badiou presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with politics, and questions what constitutes political truth."--Jacket.

"A compilation of selected pieces intended for performance in the theatrical sense."--Notes.

Selected poems from the Theragatha and Therigatha.

"Cross Words refers to cultural hybrids, trans-cultural alliances, and associations. This fascinating compendium documents--in essays, conversations, and Socratic raps--the vital work poets perform when they write across borders. Anne Waldman is the author of more than forty collections of poetry, the editor of numerous anthologies, and, for The Iovis Trilogy, the winner of the Shelley Memorial Award and the USA PEN Center Award for Poetry. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Laura E. Wright is a poet, translator, and librarian. With Anne Waldman, she co-edited Beats at Naropa (Coffee House Press, 2009). "--