Lexi Rudnitsky's collection, A Doorless Knocking into Night, bursts with poems of conscience, wit, and appetite. Originally published in 2006 after the poet's sudden death at the age of 32, it is a showcase of her poetic convictions and gifts: a literary descendent of Elizabeth Bishop and Murial Rukeyser, her writing is also full of playful wisdom, à la Heather McHugh and Kay Ryan, and the erotic charge of H.D., Anne Sexton and Kim Addonizio. In short, Rudnitsky was a poet of captivating talent, one who wrote alluring and incisive poems full of personal stake and real-world consequence.
Available again more than two decades after its publication, this new edition of A Doorless Knocking into Night includes a new foreword by acclaimed poet Donna Masini. It is published in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry, which underwrites the annual publication of a first book by a woman poet-among them past winners Molly McCully Brown, Kimberly Grey, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Anni Liu, Valencia Robin, and Alexandra Teague.