The Iovis Trilogy, Anne Waldman's monumental feminist epic, traverses epochs, cultures, and genres to create a visionary call to poetic arms. Iovis details the misdeeds of the Patriarch, and with a fierce imagination queries and subverts his warmongering. All of Waldman's themes come into focus—friendship, motherhood, politics, and Buddhist wisdom. This is epic poetry that goes beyond the old injunction, "to include history"—its effort is to change history.

This transformative twenty-five-year labor is published here for the first time in its historic entirety, including the first two out-of-print volumes.

Deemed a "countercultural giant" by Publishers Weekly, Anne Waldman is one of the best known and celebrated female poets not only in the United States, but around the world. A prominent figure of the Beat Generation and New York School, she has had close ties with poets such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Ted Berrigan, and Barbara Guest, and she was a poet in residence during Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue Tour. She has published over forty books of poetry, including Fast Speaking Woman, Marriage: A Sentence, In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems, and Manatee/Humanity. She has also edited numerous anthologies including The Beat Book, Civil Disobediences, Angel Hair Sleeps with a Boy In My Head, and Beats at Naropa.

Anne Waldman has performed on the world stage from Madrid to Mumbai, from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Nicaragua. She divides her time between Boulder, Colorado, and Greenwich Village, New York.