Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts 3-14 is maximal poetry. Her rich and manifold range of reference and expression--emotional, intellectual, and observational--is illuminated through a dazzling array of techniques. These poems never let us settle down and never let us down. Strong feeling, complex thought, precise observation, and superb technique--what more do we need?
--Jackson Mac Low

This is cutting-edge writing: cerebral, funny, elliptical, bodily, insurgent, a strategic surprise around every corner, experimental as the mind itself. Drafts--breezes under the door, through the cracks of language; intoxicating fluids; writing of maximum immediacy and swiftness.
--Alicia Ostriker

Modernism's impulse to defer the "end of history" (both as telos and terminus) is central to these Drafts. Rachel Blau DuPlessis is writing a kind of history of the end in which all knowledge is temporary or tentative, unremembered, censored or distorted, lapsed, smashed, decayed. The figure of the writer picking through the detritus is associated metonymically with the fractured parts of the world, parts of speech, the departed, the dead. In the act of postponement (which writing in some sense always is) she reclaims the space of an (un) imaginable future. These poems, dense and discursive, cast a shadow, which is amazingly congruent with the reader's own sense of reality.
--Beverly Dahlen