A masterful meditation on our most mercurial and abiding of poetic forms—the long poem For decades, Rachel Blau DuPlessis has shown readers how genres, forms, and the literal acts of writing and reception can be understood as sites of struggle. In her own words, “writing is a praxis in which the author disappears into a process, into a community, into discontinuities, and into a desire for discovery.” It is cause for celebration, then, that we have another work of warm, incisive, exploratory writing from DuPlessis in A Long Essay on the Long Poem. Long poems, DuPlessis notes, are...