We are currently selling individual books directly from our website, for full series, you can order Lost & Found Series I through VIII here at Small Press Distribution.

Grounded in an exploration of relationships between writers and their guides past or present, as well as particular times and places, Lost & Found Series VIII unfolds an astounding array of unknown materials that reconfigure our present cultural and social map. From Argentinian exile Julio Cortázar’s erudite and intimate companionship with John Keats, as portrayed in never before translated excerpts from his little known first book, to Diane di Prima’s methodical thinking through the ritual of a poetics based on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound—in the form of her raw notes to a series of lectures—we glimpse the depth and stakes of transmission across time. In Mary Norbert Korte’s 1967 Response to Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras, we see the human gesture of one poet reaching out to another at a time of radical political and personal transition, as Korte is considering leaving the Dominican Sisterhood she had been a member of in order to lead a different life. The discovery of Muriel Rukeyser’s student translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, undertaken in the early 1930s while Rukeyser was active over the Scottsboro Trial, amply displays the roots of her poetics and the basis of her lifelong commitment to translation. Not tied to an individual relationship but to a whole community, selections from Pedro Pietri’s poetry and activist art during the AIDS crisis, Condom Poems 4 Sale One Size Fits All—with an envelope of reproduced visual artifacts—demonstrates Pietri’s commitment to working outside mainstream forms to incite the people’s imagination.

This series includes the following publications:

Image Credits, left to right, top to bottom: Photo of Rev. Pedro Pietri, 1990, courtesy of ADÁL; Photo of Jack Spicer and Mary Norbert Korte at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference, by Tové Neville, with permission of The Estate of Jack Spicer; Photo of Diane di Prima by Allen Ginsberg, courtesy Stanford University Libraries / Allen Ginsberg Estate; Photo of Julio Cortázar in 1967 by Sara Facio; Photograph of Muriel Rukeyser by Nancy Naumberg, 1937 courtesy of Bill Rukeyser.

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Collected in: Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative

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