A Book of Witness

A landmark collection by one of America's leading avant-gardists. A Book of Witness: Spells & Gris-Gris is Jerome Rothenberg's passage from one century--one millennium--to another. Of the one hundred poems that comprise the book, the first half were written in 1999, the second in the two years that followed. But far more than a marker of era-shifting, it is a collection that reestablishes the primacy of the poetic "I, " not in the sense of a confessional, personal voice, but of the grammatical first person as both a singular witness and conduit for others--a kind of prophecy. Often incantatory, the poems in A Book of Witness are a reaffirmation of self in the face of history's darknesses, a shout for life against an indifferent universe. A Book of Witness is Rothenberg's thirteenth book with New Directions, his first since A Paradise of Poets (1999). An internationally celebrated poet, translator, and experimentalist, he is also the editor of several groundbreaking anthologies, most recently, with Pierre Joris, of Poems for the Millennium (University of California, 1995 and 1998). In 2002, he was the recipient, with Milos Sovak, of PEN Center USA's translation prize, for Antilyrik & Other Poems (Green Integer), by the Czech poet Viteslav Nezval