A Book of Witness: Spells and Gris-Gris

A landmark collection by one of America's leading avant-gardists.A Book of Witness: Spells & Gris-Gris is Jerome Rothenberg's passage from one century—one millennium—to another. Of the one hundred poems that comprise the book, the first half were written in 1999, the second in the two years that followed. But far more than a marker of era-shifting, it is a collection that reestablishes the primacy of the poetic "I," not in the sense of a confessional, personal voice, but of the gramma…