Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays

Anne Waldman takes the opportunity with this twentieth-anniversary expanded edition to add twenty poems to this collection that brings into focus her lifelong engagement with “Chant” as central to contemporary performative poetry.

Here are spells, invocations, laments, ritual rants. Archaic beliefs in magic and ecstasy meet current notions of the power of the spoken word. Waldman writes, "The poem is a textured energy field or modal structure. The poems for performance seem to manifest …