About the Author:
Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) is one of our country's most influential yet neglected writers. She published fifteen collections of poetry, plays, translations, children's books, and several works of nonfiction. Her "toys of fame" include the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Copernicus Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Award. From 1975-1976, she served as president of P.E.N. American Center.
From Booklist:
Rukeyser (1913-80) wrote clarion poems that illuminate the interface of the personal and the political, children's books, plays, biographies, and one strange and beautiful verse drama, this metaphorically lush and wryly incisive interpretation of the psyche and art of Harry Houdini. Her musical was performed once in 1973 with Christopher Walken playing the title role, and then was set aside, unpublished until now. A powerfully provocative figure, Houdini inspires Rukesyer to ponder our love/hate relationship with the body, our desire for magic and acceptance of illusion, the link between exhibitionism and exorcism, and the eroticism of bondage and the myth of escapism. Rukeyser's Houdini is simultaneously a jaded performer who bamboozles his audience and a mystic, a man who vehemently attacked phony spiritualists yet who pined for communion with his dead. And then there's his wife, Bess, emblematic, for Rukesyer, of longing and stoicism, who utters one of the poet's most resounding lines, "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." Donna Seaman
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