DuPlessis’s Selected Poems is a generous collection including early work “rewriting the lyric” through serial poems to a comprehensive selection from her long poem Drafts. The book includes work from Traces, with Days up to 2020, including a selection of one of her collage poems.

True to their name [Drafts], the poems accent provisionality, risk, the absence of guarantee, delving into words and word parts with a heteroglossic verve that seems vengeance at times. With recourse to an astonishing range of techniques and material devices, formal concern as inclination and qualm, these poems register, lament, react to and wrestle with erosions on multiple fronts—psychic, social, historical, somatic….They affirm and negate the toll history takes on letter and spirit, affirming and negating and navigating a way between.

— Nathaniel Mackey, Chancellors’ Reading List


These new books [from Traces, with Days] remain true to the sense of loss that haunted DuPlessis’s generation and still haunts us—lost people or “the disappeared” and, increasingly, the lost species climate change brings. I have focused on the politically engaged and materially embodied nature of DuPlessis’s recent works here, and how they speak to our “catapulted” contemporary state. I have looked back at how they move on from and connect with her previous serial poems and her deep classical, Jewish, and modernist roots, and considered her restless search for new-old forms that can mirror the complexity of our “Human Universe.”

— Harriet Tarlo, Chicago Review


Throughout her distinguished career, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has explored hybridity in its many forms, working at the interstices of modern/postmodern, sacred/secular, long poem/lyric, text/image.

— Paul Jaussen

https://www.chax.org/product-page/selected-poems-of-rachel-blau-duplessis