Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Mesopotopia

Mesopotopia

Waldman, Anne

Paperback

Series: Penguin Poets

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $20.00

ISBN10: 0143137026
ISBN13: 9780143137023
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: Aug 12 2025
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
To understand the radiance of the poetry world you have to look at Anne. --Eileen Myles, author of A Working Life

From one of the most important and irreducible living American poets (Poetry Foundation) comes a powerful and prophetic collection of epic scope and vision

Mesopotopia explores the vast sweep of our accelerating, precipitous world. From the cradle to the grave, from the mysterious poetic origins of Mesopotamia to our own dystopias of the twenty-first century, Anne Waldman crafts a singular, radical investigation into the syncretic layers of quantum space and dreamtime. She invokes studying as the most compelling ritual and tool for evolution and travels to various fellaheen worlds, treading metabolic pathways and ancient antitheses realities, and gleans sacred texts that speak urgently through the transports and telepathies of poetry. Troubadour dawn songs, pyramid texts, Buddhist mantras, canonical hours of Judeo-Christian tradition, Persian prayers, Druid sorcery, and the wild, gnarly syntax and modal structure of Waldman's particular performative passion and wit are all conjured here.

What emerges is a meditation on the salient words of the French poet Antonin Artaud contemplating the destruction and rubble post-World War II: We are not yet born, we are not yet in the world, there is not yet a world, things have not been made, the reason for being has not yet been found. Mesopotopia--mythic maelstrom, rhythmic rite of passage, protolanguage trance dance--moves toward release and gnosis.

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