Three pivotal works conceived by the avant-garde poet as a trilogy and now together in one volume at last.

"Waldrop...demonstrates how vital the prose poem can be in the hands of someone who fully understands it." --William Doreski, Harvard Review

Rosmarie Waldrop's Curves to the Apple brings together three highly praised and influential titles: The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle , and Reluctant Gravities. Though originally published separately, these prose poems have always been intended as a loose trilogy of thought and feeling--or of thought manifested as feeling. The author comments: "Just as the title, Curves to the Apple, combines the organic and geometry (not to mention myth and history of science) the poems navigate the conflicting, but inextricable claims of body and mind, especially the female body and feelings in a space of logic and physics. The poems could all be called dialogic, reaching out across a synaptic (sometimes humorous) gap to a possible 'you' (though it may be rhetorical, another point of view in the same mind). But while the 'I' dominates the first two volumes, the third gives both voices equal space and chance."

About The Reproduction of Profiles : "The subtlety of this wit, the generous humor of its insistent clarity, simply the fact that here a body finally can determine a mind--all adds up to a singular new work by a very exceptional poet." --Robert Creeley

About Lawn of Excluded Middle : "Working on a deceptively small scale, she maps a geography of intimate feelings....This is one of the finest works of a prolific and distinguished career." --Geoffrey O'Brien, Newsday

About Reluctant Gravities : "Rosmarie Waldrop's Reluctant Gravities completes a trilogy of books that have had enormous impact on the terrain of postwar American poetry....Like its predecessors, it is a complex book that deserves to be read with considerable attention." --W. Martin, Verse

Author of over fifteen books of poetry, prize-winning translator of Jabès and Celan, teacher, and (with husband Keith Waldrop) publisher of Burning Deck Press, ROSMARIE WALDROP keeps re-establishing herself as one of our foremost avant-garde stylists and most original poet-philosophers.

Also from New Directions by Waldrop: Blindsight, ISBN 0-8112-1559-8

Date of publication: September 2006