The Serpent And The Fire : Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present – Edited by Jerome Rothenberg & Javier Taboada

Hardback

816 pages

University of California Press

ISBN: 9780520303546

Jerome Rothenberg's final anthology--an experiment in omnipoetics with Javier Taboada--reaches into the deepest origins of the Americas, north and south, to redefine America and its poetries, gathering vital pieces from all parts of the Western Hemisphere and the range of European and Indigenous languages within: a unique range of cultures and languages going back several millennia, an experiment in what the editors call an American 'omnipoetics.' The Serpent and the Fire is divided into four chronological sections--from early pre-Columbian times to the immediately contemporary--and five thematic sections that move freely across languages and shifting geographical boundaries to underscore the complexities, conflicts, contradictions, and continuities of the poetry of the Americas. The book also boasts contextualizing commentaries to connect the poets and poems in dialogue across time and space