Mars

A West Coast avant-garde antiwar classic reemerges in the current era of American-made global mayhem.

Over the course of a year, from February 1991 to February 1992, Norma Cole wrote Mars, an ambitious book-length project responding to the events before, during, and after the First Gulf War, a.k.a. "Operation Desert Storm." But Mars is by no means simply a straightforward chronicle of war and the propaganda intended to shore up citizen support for it. Informed by her reading of French feminist philosophers, American modernists, and classic chroniclers of war and hell like Virgil, Dante, and Milton, Mars addresses the big questions such as: "Is poetry an efficacious form of politics in the face of imperialist aggression?"Mars doesn't answer these questions so much as wrestle with them, turning these strategies on themselves, as well as, in the words of her mentor Robert Duncan, "the deeper unsatisfied war beneath / and behind the declared war." This new edition reproduces the original's stunning wraparound cover art, which was created for the book by famed collage artist, Jess, and includes a new essay with Cole's reminiscence about the genesis of that artwork.