UI Press | Aaron Kramer | Wicked Times: Selected Poems

Wicked Times

Selected Poems

The first comprehensive selection of an important American proletarian poet who was passionately engaged in the major issues of his time

This is the collected work of a major, versatile American poet passionately engaged with everything from the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War to his love for New York City and his wife. The editors argue that his long poem sequence, Denmark Vesey, stands as the most ambitious poem about African American history ever written by a white American. Wicked Times includes previously unpublished poems and the first detailed account of Kramer's life, along with photos and extensive explanatory notes.

"I loved the man and his poems. He was the revolutionary angel of American poetry."--Pete Seeger

"A collection that inspires both admiration and gratitude in a reader. The neglected poet Aaron Kramer was an artist of considerable substance, and this volume performs an invaluable service to U.S. cultural history by restoring Kramer's work to print in a form that showcases the breadth and depth of his achievement."--Alan Wald, Professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of Exiles from a Future Time

Aaron Kramer (1921-97) is the author of The Alarm Clock, Denmark Vesey and Other Poems, and The Burning Bush. His poems have appeared in Kenyon Review and Icarus. He is the editor of On Freedom’s Side: An Anthology of American Poems of Protest. Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and general editor of The American Poetry Recovery Series. His most recent book with UIP is The Wound and the Dream: Sixty Years of American Poems about the Spanish Civil War. Donald Gilzinger Jr. is a professor of English at Suffolk County Community College in Selden, New York. His Aaron Kramer bibliography is available online at http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/gilzind/Akbib.htm

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