A CITY FULL OF VOICES

<p>Robert Kelly is one of the major and most prolific American poets of our time. Between 1961 when his first collection <em>Armed Descent</em> was published by Hawk’s Well Press and <em>Seaspel</em> brought out in 2019 by Lunar Chandelier Collective Kelly has published some 66+ books of poetry as well as 14 volumes of prose including novels short stories & essays. <em>A City Full of Voices</em> is the companion volume to the 2014 <em>A Voice Full of Cities</em> <em>the Collected Essays of Robert Kelly</em> also published by Contra Mundum Press.</p><p>This book gathers a wide range of commentaries — from single-phrase response to full-blown essay personal meditation & various forms of book reviews — on Kelly’s monumental oeuvre. It covers early reception by a previous generation of poets — such as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley — welcoming Kelly among their company mid-career assessments via an array of compañeros & compañeras for whom Kelly’s work has been sustenance and inspiration over many decades and goes all the way to critical investigations by those younger readers & students of the work coming to Robert Kelly’s poetry today. Eminent voices among the contributors include Guy Davenport & Stan Brakhage Paul Blackburn & Diane Wakoski Jerome Rothenberg & Clayton Eshleman George Quasha & Charles Stein P. Adams Sitney & Sharon Mesmer John Yau & Jennifer Moxley Jed Rasula & Mary Caponegro among many others.</p><p>Robert Kelly’s own voice can also be heard in a series of “Threads” (in which various interview excerpts directly or indirectly speak to the sections or “books” they precede or follow) that link both in form & content back to the previous volume and in three landmark interviews with Kelly in full that also mark three different moments in time: 1963 1974 & 2007. Both volumes together thus offer the reader not only a “collected” & “critical” essays but also a “<em>Selected Interviews</em>.”</p><p>It may seem surprising — & in fact it is — that an oeuvre of such distinction complexity and depth has had to wait until the poet’s 84 year to be fêted with a volume of essays. But here it is: <em>A City Full of Voices </em>the first substantive multi-voiced gathering of writings about one of the absolutely opulent lavish generous & bountiful life-works by one of the great contemporary American poets.</p>