8.5 x 5.5 in wrappers, 154 pp., with French flap covers. Cover design by M.C. Kinniburgh. Co-published with Lost & Found Elsewhere. Edited by Iris Cushing and Jason Weiss.

Jumping into the American River: New & Selected Poems, Volume I, is the first selection of new poetry published by Mary Korte in nearly three decades, drawing from a selection of new, unpublished, and prior works. 

Mary Norbert Korte (1934–2022) grew up on Mystic Street in Oakland, California. She was drawn to poetry at a young age. At 17, she took nun’s vows with the Dominican Catholic Sisterhood, and earned her bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Latin while in the convent. Korte attended the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference, encountering Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Lew Welch, among other poets. This foray into San Francisco Renaissance poetry altered the course of Korte’s life. She befriended Michael McClure, David Meltzer, Spicer, and Welch, and developed her own mystically-charged poetics. Korte’s first collection of poems, Hymn to the Gentle Sun, was published by Robert Hawley’s Oyez Press in 1967. The following year, Korte formally left the Dominican order and embarked on the lay life of the poet.

From 1973 onward, Korte lived in Mendocino County, on the bank of the Noyo River. She published five more books, including Mammals of Delight (Oyez, 1978), and became heavily involved in environmental activism, working with Judi Bari and Earthfirst! to save old growth redwoods. Between 1979 and 2009, Korte fought tirelessly to protect a large area of redwood forest at the Noyo headwaters, which is now permanently preserved by the Mendocino Land Trust. Korte was a prolific, compassionate, often hilarious poet. 

Garrett Caples writes: "Don’t take my word for it; take Michael McClure’s, Jack Spicer’s, Lew Welch’s, Diane di Prima’s, Denise Levertov’s, and Allen Ginsberg’s, for these poets and more recognized a fellow practitioner of the state of the art in Mary Norbert Korte. Bursting into the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 in a soon-discarded nun’s habit, Korte published in the thriving mimeo scene of the era, but then largely dropped out, going off grid and devoting herself to redwood preservation. Jumping into the American River: New & Selected Poems instead shows Korte pursuing the art as a devotional practice within her life. Unashamedly occasional, quotidian, diaristic, Korte’s poems nonetheless partake in a mystic ecological consciousness, her art concealed by apparent clarity. But check out a mid-’80s tour de force like 'In Memoriam' to glimpse the sheer range of subject matter and linguistic material she can bring to a single poem. A much-needed reintroduction to a missing figure of San Francisco Renaissance/ Beat poetry, with an excellent biographical introduction and an intimate portrait as afterword, Jumping into the American River is a crucial rediscovery from a heroic era in American poetry."

Printed by David McNamara at Publish Publish, with layout by Amir Andalib. Second printing.

As new.