In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.

Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years

Biographies & Memoirs

Di Prima, Diane

Arts & Literature

Penguin Publishing Group

Long regarded as an underground classic for its gritty and unabashedly erotic portrayal of the Beat years, Memoirs of a Beatnik is a moving account of a powerful woman artist coming of age sensually and intellectually in a movement dominated by a small confederacy of men, many of whom she lived with and loved. Filled with anecdotes about her adventures in New York City, Diane di Prima's memoir shows her learning to "raise her rebellion into art," and making her way toward literary success. Memoirs of a Beatnik offers a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumphs of the imagination.

Memoirs of a Beatnik

Penguin??Books

Loba is a visionary epic quest for the reintegration of the femimine, hailed by many as the great female counterpart to Allen Ginsberg's Howl when the first half appeared in 1978. Now published for the first time in its completed form with new material, Loba, "she-wolf" in Spanish explores the wilderness at the heart of experience, through the archetype of the wolf goddess, elemental symbol of complete self-acceptance.

Loba (Penguin Poets)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Opening to the Poem

Poetry

Penguin (Non-Classics)

From one of the Beat movement's most accomplished writer's comes a witty, sexy autobiography and feminist epic poem. Long regarded as an underground classic for its gritty and unabashedly erotic portrayal of the Beat years, MEMOIRS OF A BEATNIK is a moving account of a powerful woman artist in a movement dominated by a small confederacy of men, many of whom she lived with and loved.

United States

Last Gasp of San Francisco

Revolutionary Letters

Now back in print, this expanded edition of Revolutionary Letters shows di Prima  at the peak of her artistry. This seminal work of political and personal philosophy is written in a direct but lyrical style, lending itself to exploring emotions and relationships and the phantoms they leave behind. Her poems and stories reflect an artist who is constantly stretching the limits of autobiographical fiction. “Diane di Prima is an adept and flexible provider of the real.” — Robert Creeley 

This edition is the new volume of di Prima's classic Revolutionary Letters. There are some new pieces added in, and new edits on older pieces, done by the author. A new expanded edition of Loba (twice as long as the 1978 Wingbow Press edition) was published in the Penguin Poets series in August 1998. Her autobiographical memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, was published by Viking in April 2001.

REVOLUTIONARY LETTERS

Last Gasp

Revolutionary Letters, etc. , 1966-1978 (The Pocket Poet Series)

City Lights Books

Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968. One of her collections of poetry, The Poetry Deal, is also published by City Lights Publishers. Di Prima was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She has been awarded the National Poetry Association’s Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis Foundation and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence University granted her an honorary doctorate.

Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems

City Lights Publishers

Fifty years ago, in 1968, Diane di Prima began writing her “revolutionary letters,” a series of poems composed of a potent blend of utopian anarchism and ecological awareness, projected through a zen-tinged feminist lens. In 1971, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published them in the first edition of Revolutionary Letters as Number 27 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, with a cover featuring his own distinctive calligraphic interpretation of the title.By turns a handbook of countercultural activity and a broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters remains one of the vital classics of American poetry. Di Prima has published four subsequent editions (three of them with City Lights), adding new material each time. Revolutionary Letters: Expanded Edition is the latest iteration of this 50-year project, published in a deluxe, board-bound edition and featuring the original cover. Beginning with the poems from the first edition along with what was added along the way, the collection ends with di Prima’s latest “letters,” written in the decade between 2007-2017.From "Revolutionary Letter #1":I have just realized that the stakes are myself / I have no other / ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my lifePraise for Revolutionary Letters:"Revolutionary Letters are action philosophy on the road to soul-building, to our realized mammal-hood, and to our humanity … di Prima's imagination and inspiration cause these poems to become more brilliant with passage of time, and with the growing number of more recent Letters water-falling over the lip of what we think is possible."—Michael McClure"Diane di Prima is the original outlaw poet."—Michelle Tea“Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes. … She broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity.”—Allen Ginsberg

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Di Prima, Diane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Di Prima, Diane

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Di Prima, Diane. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years

Memoirs of a Beatnik

Loba (Penguin Poets)

Opening to the Poem

Memoirs of a Beatnik

Revolutionary Letters

REVOLUTIONARY LETTERS

Revolutionary Letters, etc. , 1966-1978 (The Pocket Poet Series)

Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems

Revolutionary Letters