Testimony: The United States 1885-1915: Recitative

Testimony: The United States 1885-1915: Recitative by Reznikoff, Charles. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781567925319.

A major work by an essential American poet, published in full for the first time. Available again for the first time since 1978-and complete in one volume for the first time ever-Charles ReznikoffsTestimonyis a lost masterpiece, a leg- endary book that stands alongside Louis Zukofskys "A" and William Carlos WilliamssPatersonas a milestone of modern American poetry. Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts, Reznikoffs book sets forth a stark panorama of late- 19th- and early 20th-century America-the underside of the Gilded Age, beset by racism and casual violence, poverty and disease-in a radically stripped-down lan- guage of almost unbearable intensity. This edition also includes Reznikoff s prose studies for the poem, unavailable to readers since the 1930s, and a new introduction by essayist Eliot Weinberger.