DIANE DI PRIMA ILLEGAL ABORTION POEM Brass Furnace Going Out AMIRI BARAKA Association
In this work Beat poet Diane di Prima penned some of the most powerful lines about abortion ever written.
BRASS FURNACE GOING OUT SONG, AFTER AN ABORTION by DIANE DI PRIMA
Published by PulpArtForms / Intrepid Press, Syracuse, New York, 1975. First edition, No. 9 from "The Beau Fleuve Series". Edited by Allen De Loach.
Printed wrappers, side staple bound, 10.75 x 8.25 inches, thin item with 16 unnumbered pages, printed on newsprint, front cover with halftone reproduction of a sculpture by Suzanne Benton, "Fertile Donation Box", rear wrapper with ads and halftone portrait of the author.
VERY GOOD Condition: age toning as normal (printed on newsprint), otherwise bright, clean, and unmarked, a very good copy of this fragile work. OCLC locates no copies of this, or any other edition.
One of her most acclaimed poems, written in 1960 after di Prima was pressured by her partner poet LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) to abort their child. A bewildering, raw and powerful work, from a lonely bus ride to an underground clinic to the life changing grief that came after. Di Prima believed that abortion, fraught, Illegal and dangerous as it was, was "our woman right". Diane di Prima (1934-2020) was a rare, prominent female voice in the Beat community alongside her counterparts like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.