Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, critic and collagist who has written extensively on gender, poetry, and poetics, along with other social locations in texts. As a SELECTED POEMS 1980-2020, this volume from CHAX Press is a career survey of stylistic and thematic scope. Her work in poetry is centered by the multi-volume long poem Drafts, 114 cantos (1986-2012), whose range and intensities move from the cosmological to the granular, from joy to historical trauma. Her newest critical book A Long Essay on the Long Poem (University of Alabama Press, 2023) schematizes the purposes and poetics of long modes. Beyond the two collage works from Drafts, DuPlessis has also published the book-length collage poems Graphic Novella (2015), Numbers (2018), and Life in Handkerchiefs (2022). The collections of Traces, with Days, her twenty-first century serial poem in book- sized episodes, examine contemporary historical materials and the personal quotidian within the fine mesh of poetic discourses. DAYS AND WORKS, LATE WORK, AROUND THE DAY IN 80 WORLDS, Poetic Realism, and Daykeeping, published from 2017 to 2023 are episodes in this current grouping. Her critical work is noted for a trilogy about gender and poetics, The Pink Guitar (1990, 2006), Blue Studios (2006), and Purple Passages (2012). She edited The Selected Letters of George Oppen and has commented variously on other poets in the Objectivist formation.
