Description:
Lyrical and unforgettable, part elegy and part memoir, we present a previously unpublished masterpiece from the Beat Generation icon. Simultaneously released with an expanded edition of di Prima's classic Revolutionary Letters on the one-year anniversary of her passing.
Review Quotes:
One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2021.
Praise for Spring and Autumn Annals:
"With Revolutionary Letters and Spring and Autumn Annals, di Prima's conversations are continuing apace-a one-two punch of radical imagination and luminous language; memoir and mobilization."-KQED
"City Lights has graced us with two di Prima collections--the previously unpublished Spring and Autumn Annals, and an expanded edition of her classic Revolutionary Letters--a feast from one of the great talents of the Beat generation and beyond. Di Prima, who died in 2020, was a poet we chose time and again for her spiritual examinations, feminist presence, and her passion for and range of linguistic constructs. We're lucky to have these two new volumes, which will inspire deeper contemplation of her work and impact."--Chicago Review of Books
"Spring and Autumn Annals takes the reader through di Prima's own rite of mourning--for her friend, for the changing milieu of their scene, and for a city that, without Freddie, could no longer hold her. ... Annals is a different kind of book in its in-the-moment-ness. Unlike memoirs written decades after the fact, where events are shaded with the wisdom gained in the intervening years, Annals understands much less about the significance of its events. It is raw, immediate, and vulnerable. Yet to treat Annals purely as documentation would be to diminish its literary dimensions."--The Nation
"Part diary and part recollection of their friendship, Spring and Autumn Annals is an intimate account of grief spliced with gossip and observation. ... [di Prima's] prose, visual and textured, is adroit at capturing mood and moving between the philosophical and the quotidian, the avant-garde and the domestic."--The Times Literary Supplement
"Di Prima catalogs the settings and moments that make up a life lived between the countercultures of New York City and San Francisco: the black-box theaters of New York's Greenwich Village, tough conversations at Arthur's Tavern, 'the steam on the windows at Houston Street, ' the drive to Stinson Beach, an endless rotating carousel of apartments and visits from friends. What emerges is a tribute not only to [Freddie] Herko, but to the practice of living collectively in an artistic community, in defiance of the pressure that capitalism exerts on artists to compete with one another. Her account is loving in its attention to detail, fascinating as a historical document, and moving in its portrayal of a life-changing friendship."--Literary Hub
"This volume, studded with beautiful moments ... began as letters [di Prima] wrote daily to dancer and Andy Warhol acolyte Freddie Herko, who leapt to his death from a window when he was 29, leaving many projects and plans unfulfilled. ... With evocative detail and introspective insight, she writes of that loss and the feeling of being turned loose, occasionally unmoored, struggling to create art through years of living in barely habitable apartments. ... A useful document for scholars of the Beat generation."--Kirkus Reviews
"A work of memoir and elegy by one of the great, under-recognized women Beats, a year after her death. Begun as letters to a friend, the dancer Freddie Herko, who died by suicide, the work is both a meditation on friendship and an account of a Brooklyn childhood that turned into a Village adulthood in the thick of a pivotal cultural moment."--Lydia Kiesling, The Millions
"The Annals is not a book of reading but one of writing, living and writing ... She chronicles trips to California and to Freddie [Herko]'s a