Secular Ex Votos

Secular Ex Votos makes a virtue of scrap –– paper, phrase, color, afterthought — until nothing feels left over. Rachel Blau DuPlessis turns what could be minor (collage, motto, gratitude) into a restless visual-textual engine: wit spliced to wilderness, aphorism to accident. The pages don’t illustrate so much as think—cut, layered, re-cut—where design is argument and gratitude is a practice of seeing otherwise. —Charles Bernstein Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ collages are zones of captivating encounters: between word and image, praise and refuse, raggy aphorisms and glue, and most importantly, poesis and thought. Secular Ex Votos is a formidable, galvanic experiment in poetic dexterity and the “manyness” of gratitude. A patchwork of tiny praises, each collage embodies the full scope of DuPlessis’ humour, wit, and curiosity for the unexpected. Secular Ex Votos is a stark reminder of the power of gratitude in darkening times. —Orchid Tierney, author of Looking at the Tiny In days when language itself is suspect, and writing seen as amoral tool to distance from or manipulate toward horrors, Rachel Blau DuPlessis gifts us with visual-poetic openings toward kinder possibilities. To thank or to praise is to face outward with generosity, and these works that explore juxtapositions of "edges, colors, syntax" make alive again a sensation of ethical connection and aesthetic responsibility. "Grateful for the thirty-two paths of letters and numbers," is both affirmation of and gesture toward poem, art, better world. May we join the poet to "praise poesis"! —Marcella Durand, author of The Temple of Happiness Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, scholar/critic and collagist whose notable long poem Drafts was published in 114 cantos by Coffee House Press (2025); it is conceptualized as an excessive and wide-ranging work of soci-poesis within an ethical aesthetics. CHAX Press had published her Selected Poems 1980-2020 in 2022. Among her works in collage are books joining texts—aphorism, ruminations, and meditative poems—with collage. Secular Ex Votos, Life in Handkerchiefs, NUMBERS, Churning the Ocean of Milk (on-line), and Graphic Novella interpret life with mythic wondering, joyous confrontations, documentary, and memory texts. In her career as a poet-critic, she has written extensively on gender, poetry and poetics, including a classic gender trilogy The Pink Guitar Writing as Feminist Practice; Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work; and Purple Passages on the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry. In a grouping of seven recent books , she faces the recent past with a fierce poetic response. Among these books are Late Work, Around the Day in 80 Worlds, and Daykeeping. The book called Blazes (Subpress) caps this series of shorter books from 2015-2027. Her considerable critical work on Objectivist poetry and poetics includes her pioneering editing of The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Among her several awards are a residency at Bellagio, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a year at the National Humanities Center. Poetry by DuPlessis in translation includes books in French, Italian and Russian, and individual works and chapbooks appearing in German, Portuguese and Spanish. Her website is www.rachelblauduplessis.net; all Drafts are available recorded at www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/DuPlessis.php She is Emerita Professor at Temple University. Read more