The Serpent and the Fire

"No one taught me more about poetry than Jerome Rothenberg."—Nick Cave

"Embracing the Americas as 'a self-perpetuating work in progress,' this book honors poetry as ungovernable, as a field of knowledge, grounded and dispersed. The hemispheric here is also archipelagic, Indigenous, diasporic, and attuned to what Lezama Lima calls 'a continuity that questions.'"—Urayoán Noel, Associate Professor at New York University

"The Serpent and the Fire is an extraordinary compendium of the myriad poetic expressions of the Americas. Spanning three millennia, from the Neolithic to the present, from handprints to earthworks, the editors take us on a remarkable journey through pre-Conquest civilizations, invasions, colonialism, the African heritage, waves of immigration, Indigenous cultures, industrialization, creation myths, geographies, ethnicities, shamans, ceremonies, and gods worshipped then and now."—Homero Aridjis, poet and President Emeritus of PEN International

"The Serpent and the Fire is the newest in a series of anthologies that make the poetry of the Americas a necessary field of knowledge. Rothenberg and Taboada's selections present multiple galleries, configuring a newer and more expansive map of techniques and histories. The anthology threads through its galleries the origins and the present of a literary practice that goes back hundreds of years while relating the personal to the collective and the local to the continental."—Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Professor of Communication and Director of Latin American Studies at Boston College