By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street
protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state
apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today
as it was at its inception, 50 years ago.
During the tumult of 1968, Beat poet Diane di Prima began writing her
'letters', poems filled with a potent blend of utopian anarchism and
Zen-tinged ecological awareness that were circulated via underground
newspapers and stapled pamphlets. First published in 1971 by Lawrence
Ferlinghetti's City Lights in the US, di Prima would go on to publish
four subsequent editions, expanding the collection each time. During the
last years of her life, di Prima got to work on the final iteration of
this lifelong project, collecting all of her previously published
'letters' and adding the new work, poems written from 2007 up to the
time of her death in October 2020.
