Mesopotopia

Advance praise for Mesopotopia:“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“Shattered light in search of sprung lyric: with boundless energy, Anne Waldman has forged an epochal poem in the seams and veils of hermetic unfoldings. Mesopotopia is a restless, wrestling, rousing, terracotta (earthen) anti-war warrior.” —Charles Bernstein, author of The Kinds of Poetry I WantPraise for Anne’s previous collection, Trickster Feminism:“The pervading mood in Trickster Feminism is of a piece with our national mood: gloom-filled, sorrowing, yet occasionally threaded with hope … Reading Waldman is like being in the world today.” —New York Times Book Review“Waldman calls upon multiple resources – spirits, suffragettes, and heroines alike – to help defeat the trickster who disempowers women through capitalism and other tools … Waldman presents a complicated panorama of places and events – including resistance after the 2016 U.S. presidential election – in these accomplished, intertwined pieces.” —Washington Post“Very apropos and very prescient … what’s reeling and alive is the freshness of topicality, personal and public, in this collection: ICE and immigration, the DOJ’s current personnel, the Women’s March, Oligarchism and global money laundering, technocracy, ‘Anthropocene weather complexities, nuclear threats, and so on.” —The Brooklyn Rail“Reads like a spellbook — a mix of prose, verse, illustration and photography, woven together like the instructions to a ritual. But the incantatory poetry of Trickster Feminism is practical magic, Waldman’s way of meditating on — and taking action against — what she says are increasingly difficult times.” —PBS.org“Waldman’s poems are layered, enchanting, and challenging, but if you’re willing to go along for the ride, their movements will unsettle your thinking on gender, feminism, and the political powers at large in the United States today.” —Tricycle Magazine

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.