Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Drafts 1-38, Toll.
Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Wesleyan Poetry. First printing. 0819564850  xii/278 pages.
Softcover volume is like new.
"In "Drafts 1-38, Toll," Rachel Blau DuPlessis has built a work which mimics memory and its losses. Her recurrent motifs include home, homelessness and exile; death and the memory of the dead; political grief and passion; silence, speech, the sayable and the ineffable. "Drafts 1-38, Toll" functions as a long poem comprised of 38 pieces, or drafts. These poems are conceived as autonomous canto-like sections that work on two procedural principles. The first is the random repetition of lines or phrases, a self-questioning, processual, and reconceptualizing strategy that honors the term "drafts." A second  is the fold, the reconsideration of an earlier draft." (Publisher's text on rear cover).
Rachel Blau DuPlessis (b. 1941) is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry.