[10/01/26] DuPlessis, Rachel Blau: Blazes

Subpress Collective, paperback

Publication Date: October 1, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

I was already feeling the weight of my responsibility to encapsulate the work of, and this work by, a titan of poetry, poetics, and criticism whose vast and various writings I’ve been poring over for decades, and then I read Blazes and my task became more daunting. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s latest and final collection of poems, collages, and prose meditations on time, art, death, and memory is the set of wayfinding marks and bright fires that its title suggests. Situated between the rigid days and the fleeting “traces” of our lives that we fight to retain in light and in spite of how “dawns regularly dawn / beyond you,” Blazes evinces a furious mind grasping at sense with the perilous syntax that DuPlessis has spent her career so beautifully engaging and upending. —Kate Colby

In her new book Rachel Blau DuPlessis offers contending renditions of what Samuel Beckett might call “how it is.” We find ourselves between enduring evidence of lives once lived, the trace, and the transfiguring oblivion of the brilliance to come, the blaze. But always amid a wealth of words. DuPlessis has long drawn forth immense thoughts from the slightest sounds. Here, elegantly, extravagantly, she celebrates the world-making power of letters. An abecedarium is broken into clusters and scattered through the pages, like seeds in the orchard that is Pardes. A series of extraordinary prose poems offers analytical exaltations of common things, photographs, phrases, flash floods . . . as avowedly secular as DuPlessis is, were there in fact a Divine creator, He or She would be reading this book right now to be reminded that a life lived in Creation, amid intelligence and travail, grief, loss, ecstasy and rage, is nonetheless a wonder. The concluding poem “Psalm 151” (and the dazzling addenda, “Blaze-mends in Gold”) is a profound act of gnostic devotion, a living through, shard after shard, of the breaking of the vessels, that primordial catastrophe regarding which DuPlessis has done, is doing, her agnostic part to redeem. —Joseph Donahue

The last in a series of six books tracking the derangement of the last decade or so, Blazes is deft and brilliant testimony to words’ power to confront and reshape the reality from which they arise. I am in awe of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s verbal gift. In poem after poem she expresses the problem of being here at all in happenstance always beyond reach. One long poem, “Psalm 151”, is a fabulous riff on Lurianic Kabbalah; another, “The Way Things Currently Are,” is the best description of the intellectual dilemma of our present American moment that I have read. The book pivots around the gradually emerging ideas of “traces” and “days” to grapple with the impossibility of our being in time, with language as our only viewing window. “All structures I might invent are aspects of this riddle, this puzzle of time. These things, the res or rays, I have recorded. Why? To grasp a cornered scrap.” —Norman Fischer

If then. Our world is a war. Where is our necessary angel? In Blazes, DuPlessis traces a path we might follow through this “bad era,” in turns assembling and dissolving, cutting and grafting. What now? Turning her scholar poet’s eye to the America we know now, DuPlessis fits form to memory and flicker to force. Gleaning. —Susan Howe