" In 1965, during the ferment of the Civil Rights Movement and protests against the Vietnam War, she explains to Herko that “new times demand new words”. And while it was her former lover Jones who gained notoriety for his declaration in “Black Art” that “we want poems that kill” – and who, by the late 1960s, had changed his name to Baraka – di Prima was also forging a new radical poetry. During that same period, she sent out “Revolutionary Letters” across the US through the Liberation News Service, a syndicated counter-cultural news outlet, and these were published in a single volume in 1971. They have long been out of print and only available online. The fiftieth anniversary edition of Revolutionary Letters harks back to a period in US history when poetry, in the words of the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was an insurgent art." Douglas Field TLS

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