Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition: Pocket Poets Series No. 27 [Hardcover]

Expanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic of eco-feminist-Zen Beat poetry, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima'sSpring and Autumn Annalson the one-year anniversary of her passing.

By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus,Revolutionary Lettersis a modern classic, as relevant today as it was at its inception, 50 years ago.

During the tumult of 1968, Beat poet Diane di Prima began writing her letters, poems filled with a potent blend of utopian anarchism and Zen-tinged ecological awareness that were circulated via underground newspapers and stapled pamphlets. In 1971, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the first collection of these poems in his iconic Pocket Poets Series, and di Prima would go on to publish four subsequent editions, expanding the collection each time. During the last years of her life, di Prima got to work on the final iteration of this lifelong project, collecting all of her previously published letters and adding the new work, poems written from 2007 up to the time of her death in October 2020. Published in a board-bound edition that proudly features the original edition's cover art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Praise forRevolutionary Letters, 50th Anniversary Edition:

There is a generosity and affection inRevolutionary Lettersthat I find myself returning to, always, when I'm at my most cynical and feeling lost for any understanding of what a better world might look like. When I need to be grounded and re-centered in my understanding of community care as a living, breathing, full-time mission. And, quite simply, when I need to be reminded of how language can begin on the page, and echo far beyond. —Hanif Abdurraqib

What's astonishing about Diane di Prima'sRevolutionary Ll3)