A major work by an essential American poet, published in full for the first time. Available again for the first time since 1978--and complete in one volume for the first time ever--Charles Reznikoff's Testimony is a lost masterpiece, a legendary book that stands alongside Louis Zukofsky's "A" and William Carlos Williams's Paterson as a milestone of modern American poetry. Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts, Reznikoff's book sets forth a stark panorama of late-19th- and early 20th-century America--the underside of the Gilded Age, beset by racism and casual violence, poverty and disease-in a radically stripped-down language of almost unbearable intensity. This edition also includes Reznikoff 's prose studies for the poem, unavailable to readers since the 1930s, and a new introduction by essayist Eliot Weinberger.
Language
English
Pages
480
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Black Sparrow Books from David R. Godine
Release
August 28, 2015
ISBN
1567925316
ISBN 13
9781567925319
Testimony: The United States 1885-1915: Recitative
A major work by an essential American poet, published in full for the first time. Available again for the first time since 1978--and complete in one volume for the first time ever--Charles Reznikoff's Testimony is a lost masterpiece, a legendary book that stands alongside Louis Zukofsky's "A" and William Carlos Williams's Paterson as a milestone of modern American poetry. Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts, Reznikoff's book sets forth a stark panorama of late-19th- and early 20th-century America--the underside of the Gilded Age, beset by racism and casual violence, poverty and disease-in a radically stripped-down language of almost unbearable intensity. This edition also includes Reznikoff 's prose studies for the poem, unavailable to readers since the 1930s, and a new introduction by essayist Eliot Weinberger.