Remembering Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1941–2026)

So this “now”
            now emerges, shadows be-fallen here,
                                               and we debate
                                                           how vast the eulogy we need.

                        —Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The Entanglements: a representation”

The zone between the living voice
and the posthumous voice
is poetry.

                        —Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “The moon and modulations of lonely

I am so very deeply saddened by the passing of Rachel Blau DuPlessis on September 2, 2026.[1] After hearing from her partner, Robert DuPlessis, I found myself weeping in my office for nearly a half hour last week, staggered by the magnitude of losing her. And so I wanted to write a little about how I got to know Rachel and her work, hoping it might provide a small glimpse into just how incredible a person, artist, and scholar/critic she was and the kind of massive positive effect she had on the people around her, even to someone who was only lightly connected to her.

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“2025.02,” “2025.04,” “2025.05–06,” “2025.07,” and “2025.11” in Other Rooms Press

And lo, today is one of those great good days in which I have two publications. “2025.02,” “2025.04,” “2025.05–06” (p. 2), “2025.07,” and “2025.11,” some of my most recent sonnets that most directly comment on this moment we find ourselves living through, just came out in Other Rooms Press. Here‘s a page that gathers the poems together (and then right click the images and open them into new tab so you can zoom in) or else click on the individual poem links above.

“Postrock” in Always Crashing

I am beyond delighted to announce that my long poem, “Postrock,” which I composed between June 2021 and July 2022 and which was supported by the Cora A. Babcock Chair in English and a number of Faculty Research Grants, has (finally!) been published in Always Crashing. This is probably the piece of writing that I am the most proud of among everything I have ever published, and so I am just utterly thrilled to be able to bring it into the world. I am forever indebted to James Tadd Adcox and the other editors of Always Crashing for their ongoing support of my work.

“Postrock” is the concluding and last unpublished poem from an unpublished manuscript (also titled Postrock and seeking a publisher!) in which I endeavor to perform what I’m calling a weird phenomenology: seeing everyday objects anew by mediating their perception through lenses of poetic, environmental, and cultural influence. In particular, “Postrock” draws explicit inspiration from John Ashbery’s Three Poems (1972), is a sustained meditation on space, and, like all the poems from the manuscript, was composed while listening to postrock music. The poem is also in conversation with a large number of other texts, including books about space by Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Blanchot, Henri Lefebvre, and others, and it was composed using a variety of formal constraints, including being composed as an unbroken, nearly twenty-thousand-word paragraph.