Description

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A captivating experimental assemblage of poetry that views North and South together in a transnational, multilingual vision of what “America” means.
 
The Serpent and the Fire breaks out of deeply entrenched models that limit “American” literature to work written in English within the present boundaries of the United States. Editors Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada gather 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.

About the Author

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Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer, with over ninety books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin, and the five-volume Poems for the Millennium. He was a founding figure of ethnopoetics as a combination of poetic practice and theory, and he has been a longtime practitioner and theorist of poetry performance.
 
Javier Taboada is a Mexican poet, translator, and anthologist currently working as Editorial Director of the Press at the Popular Autonomous University of the State of Puebla.