Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition, by Diane DiPrima

By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. In 1968, visionary poet Diane DiPrima moved from Beat New York to hippie San Francisco to begin these “letters,” poems filled with a blend of utopian imagination, radical politics, and ecological awareness. Immersed in alternative histories and mystical traditions, the poems were catapulted into the world through underground newspapers and free pamphlets, circulating far and wide. In 1971, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the first of four ever-expanding book versions in the Pocket Poets Series. In her last years, di Prima oversaw the final iteration of this lifelong project, adding poems written between 2007 and her death in 2020. This 50th Anniversary edition marks the long-awaited return of Revolutionary Letters to City Lights.