Product details
Biographical note
Charles Reznikoff, the son of Russian garment workers, was a blood-and-bone New Yorker; a collector of images and stories who walked the city from the Bronx to the Battery and breathed its soul into a lifetime of poetry.A milestone of modern poetry, American history comes to life in the actual words of victims and criminals in its courts.
Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts, Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem 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 radically stripped-down language of tremendous intensity, Reznikoff’s poem is an unforgettable reading experience. This edition also includes Reznikoff’s prose studies for the poem, unavailable to readers since the 1930s, and a new introduction by critic and essayist Eliot Weinberger.
Available again for the first time since 1978--and complete in one volume--Charles Reznikoff's Testimony is a lost masterpiece, a legendary book that stands alongside Louis Zukofsky's "A" and William Carlos Williams's Paterson as a milestone of modern American poetry.