Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous

Twenty essays by one of contemporary surrealism's major poets and theorists, Chicago Surrealist Group co-founder Franklin Rosemont. These essays focus on the ways in which surrealist perspectives have continued to evolve and expand since the movement's worldwide resurgence in the 1960s. This wide-ranging and well-illustrated collection includes prefaces to international surrealist exhibitions and texts concerning wilderness, the politics of humor, the black radical tradition, and the critique of whiteness—documenting key developments in surrealism's collective evolution. Other essays explore the work of individual poets, painters, musicians, and dancers whose creative activity exemplifies the movement's ongoing transformative project. Rosemont remarks in his introduction: "As a book about surrealism, this is also inevitably a book about freedom, desire, surprise, love, play, humor, black music, painting, collage, dance, film, ecology, subversion, revolt and revolution. Above all it is concerned with the practice of poetry: poetry as audacity and insubordination, a source and method of knowledge, a model for a better society, an adventure and experience that makes all the difference in the world."