New and Selected Poems 1961-1996 - Softcover

Rochelle Owens is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, including SOLITARY WORKWOMAN, LUCA: DISCOURSE ON LIFE AND DEATH, and NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1961-1996 (all three Junction Press); nineteen plays, collected in Futz and What Came After (Random House), The Karl Marx Play and Others (E.P. Dutton), Futz and Who Do You Want Piere Vidal? (Hawkswell Press and Broadway Play Publishing), and Plays by Rochelle Owens: Chucky's Hunch, Futz, Kontraption, Three Front (Broadway Play Publishing); the screenplay for Futz (United Commonwealth Films); and the novel Journey to Purity (Texture Press). She translated Liliane Atlan's The Passersby (Henry Holt) and edited Spontaneous Combustion: Eight New American Plays (Winter House).

It is difficult to imagine that Owens has been plowing her rows since 1961. For more than 35 years, she has been at the center of America's avante-garde, one of the few women in those circles, and this fat new volume gives readers a generous glimpse of what she has been about. Well known for her plays, which have won five Obies, she is a poet first and foremost, the author of 16 collections, the best of which is included here. That Owens writes for the stage should come as no surprise to those who know her poetry. Her work is all about voice and voices, real and imagined, historical and internal. She can bring John Wayne and Catherine the Great into the same poem, invoke Marx and Stalin, and balance lines with W.C. Williams and W.C. Fields and, in an excerpt from her mega-work-in-prorgress, Mona Lisa and Leonardo. It is perhaps other voices, though, the unidentified and unrecognized, that have the most say. From the perspective of invisibility and anonymity, Owen exposes the real world, the natural and unnatural. There's never a dull moment. Important for any large or modern literature collection.?Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
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