Surge: Drafts 96-114

A surge into twenty-first century poetry and poetics, a book of passionate poetic energies and odic verve, Surge is the provocative, open-ended ending to DuPlessis's twenty-six year long poem project, Drafts. This work exemplifies a tertium quid, transcending poetic schools and critical binaries with its fusions of intellection and emotion, with its reassessments of Dante, Eliot, Duchamp, with its witty genre experimentation, with its strands of eco-poetics, feminist analysis, conceptual torques, and unstinting poetic commitment. The book contains a contemporary mirror of The Waste Land, a striking political-emotional reflection on divided cities, an investigation of gender in a work of poet's theater, a ballad on science and reality, an index, a canzone and--over all--a scintillating texture of meditation in which the analytic lyric is intensified by the refractions of gloss.