The Dread Road

Meridel Le Sueur

The last work published in the author’s lifetime, this multi-voiced account of a bus trip from Albuquerque to Denver passing the site of the Ludlow Massacre is also a journey through the purgatory of American consciousness.  This novella, rich in allusions to writers including Whitman, Poe, and Lawrence, has also influenced a number of contemporary authors, especially women of color.  Particularly noticeable is the triple arrangement of texts on a page, with quotations from Edgar Allen Poe on the left, the core text in the center, and lyrical outcries suggesting the narrator’s memory on the right.  The work is being hailed by recent critics as a major postmodernist breakthrough.

“Meridel Le Sueur’s work stands, urgent and unique, at that ‘bloody crossroads’ where politics and culture meet.  Modernist literary experimentalism engages a distinctively feminist conception of how people defend themselves and organize for change.”—Paul Lauter, Trinity College

I demand that you listen.  Be with me on the dread journey, that dread road we must take now.  We must all take this journey into each other, into the dark but luminous heart, into the human power of memory and time in the menaced arteries, radiation striking, mutilation, we can be skinned alive without knowing it or saying a word.  Luminous and secret I summon our memory, the loving memory that is our transformation.
             —from The Dread Road

11 x 8½ inches • 65 pages • ISBN 0-931122-63-5 • $11.95