Description
An essential edition of a major avant-garde poet: “Waldrop compels us to seek out new superlatives” (Ben Lerner, Jacket)
Rosmarie Waldrop says Gap Gardening “spans forty years of exploring the language I breathe and move in and that continues to condition me even while I try to contribute to it. It tracks my turn from verse to prose poems, to focusing on the sentence and its boundaries, my increasing reliance on collage and source texts as a way of engaging with other voices, of being in dialogue.”
Gap Gardening also traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body. For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.
Reviews
"Her work [is] a powerful mixture of directness and disjunction: she conveys information at one moment only to shatter the method of conveyance at the next." — Ben Lerner, Harper's
"With this collection, it is evident that Waldrop's universe begins where Einstein's ends. Nearly fifty years of lyric riffs, meditations, and collages, using as source material the works of physicists, philosophers, explorers, historians, and critics, from Columbus to Wittgenstein, seek to simultaneously define, deconstruct, and, finally, re-construct a mind in motion." — Music & Literature
"A wonderful mix of philosophical conversation, erotic questions and astrophysical speculation—defiantly brilliant speculations." — Publishers Weekly
"A page of Waldrop will focus the reader on the intricate (or simple) ways words connect or fail to connect, depend on or defy punctuation, suggest or deny meaning." — The American Book Review
"This influential avant-garde doyenne … handily manages the paradox of the lucid enigma.… She maintains a distinctly American voice—quick-witted, conversational, and visually concrete: a poetry that pleases no less than it puzzles." — Voice Literary Supplement
"One of the leading voices in contemporary American poetry. Waldrop’s nimble poetics of ‘gap gardening’ provides the emotional and ethical center." — Boston Review
Also By: Rosmarie Waldrop 
The Shadow of the Coachman's Body
Paperback, 2022
A meticulously observed and macabre tale of hell on earth from the revolutionary German author of the famous play Marat/Sade
The Shadow of the Coachman's Body
E Book, 2022
A meticulously observed and macabre tale of hell on earth from the revolutionary German author of the famous play Marat/Sade
The Nick of Time
Paperback, 2021
A philosophical tour de force melding astrophysics and grief by the American maestra of the prose poem
The Nick of Time
E Book, 2021
A philosophical tour de force melding astrophysics and grief by the American maestra of the prose poem
Curves to the Apple: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities
Paperback, 2006
Three pivotal works conceived by the avant-garde poet as a trilogy and now together in one volume at last.
