A major work by an essential American poet, published in full for the first
time. Available again for the first time since 1978-and complete in one
volume for the first time ever-Charles Reznikoff'sTestimonyis a lost
masterpiece, a leg- endary book that stands alongside Louis Zukofsky's A
and William Carlos Williams'sPatersonas a milestone of modern American
poetry. Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and
perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts,
Reznikoff's book sets forth a stark panorama of late- 19th- and early 20th-
century America-the underside of the Gilded Age, beset by racism and casual
violence, poverty and disease-in a radically stripped-down lan- guage of
almost unbearable intensity. This edition also includes Reznikoff 's prose
studies for the poem, unavailable to readers since the 1930s, and a new
introduction by essayist Eliot Weinberger.