Roots and Routes: Poetics at New College of California

"Roots and Routes: Poetics at New College of California" is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of a vital time and place in the development of American poetry in the last decades of the last century. [...] a much-needed and major contribution to the history of American experimental poetry at the end of the last millennium, and it provides evidence for hope as the next takes hold. [...]

The intelligence and care and high seriousness of the students at the New College, the imaginative range of what instructors there presented as fundamental to the art of making, well, is flat-out inspiring. "Roots and Routes" shows what language art is about. It is a high example of how the teaching of literature, and yes, even of creative writing, can offer a true and vital initiation into the Imagination, which, as Blake reminds us, is life itself.

[Extract from book review appearing at the journal 'Pacific Coast Philology', Volume 57, Issue 1, 2022, pp. 83-86 (Article). Reviewer: Joseph Donahue] https://doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.57.1.0083