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Penguin Books
August 2025
On Sale: August 12, 2025
128 pages
ISBN: 0143137026
EAN: 9780143137023
Kindle: B0D3C1GHY4
Trade Paperback / e-Book
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Women's Fiction | Fiction Poetry
Mesopotopia explores the vast sweep of our accelerating, precipitous world. From the cradle to the grave, from the mysterious poetic origins of Mesopotamia to our own dystopias of the twenty-first century, Anne Waldman crafts a singular, radical investigation into the syncretic layers of quantum space and dreamtime. She invokes “studying” as the most compelling ritual and tool for evolution and travels to various fellaheen worlds, treading metabolic pathways and ancient “antitheses realities,” and gleans sacred texts that speak urgently through the transports and telepathies of poetry. Troubadour dawn songs, pyramid texts, Buddhist mantras, canonical hours of Judeo-Christian tradition, Persian prayers, Druid sorcery, and the wild, gnarly syntax and modal structure of Waldman’s particular performative passion and wit are all conjured here.
What emerges is a meditation on the salient words of the French poet Antonin Artaud contemplating the destruction and rubble post–World War II: “We are not yet born, we are not yet in the world, there is not yet a world, things have not been made, the reason for being has not yet been found.” Mesopotopia—mythic maelstrom, rhythmic rite of passage, protolanguage trance dance—moves toward release and gnosis.
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