The Serpent and the Fire

Poetries of the Americas from Origins to Present

Music legend Nick Cave called Technicians of the Sacred, Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology of spiritual writings from around the world: “probably the single most important book on poetry I have ever read.” Rothenberg died in 2024, leaving us one final testament, The Serpent and the Fire, an “anthology-experiment in omnipoetics” co-edited with the Mexican poet Javier Taboada. It reaches into the deepest origins of the Americas. “Gathering vital pieces from all parts of the Western Hemisphere and the breadth of European and Indigenous languages,” it presents an astonishing range of cultures and languages going back several millennia. In spite of the future that seems to lie ahead of us, in the United States and the world at large, this affluent gathering of spiritual gestures summoned from a multitude of diverse voices may inspire our search for a better path ahead. — Herbert Pföstl, Book Consultant for the New Museum Store.

The Serpent and the Fire breaks out of deeply entrenched models that limit “American” literature to work written in English within the present boundaries of the United States. Editors Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada gather vital pieces from all parts of the Western Hemisphere and the breadth of European and Indigenous languages within: a unique range of cultures and languages going back several millennia, an experiment in what the editors call an American “omnipoetics.”

The Serpent and the Fire is divided into four chronological sections—from early pre-Columbian times to the immediately contemporary—and five thematic sections that move freely across languages and shifting geographical boundaries to underscore the complexities, conflicts, contradictions, and continuities of the poetry of the Americas. The book also boasts contextualizing commentaries to connect the poets and poems in dialogue across time and space.

2024; hardcover; 6 x 9 inches; 816 pages, 49 b&w; ISBN: 9780520972759.