Lexi Rudnitsky (1972–2005) was born in Athens, Greece and grew up outside of Boston. She earned a B.A. from Brown University and an M.F.A. from Columbia University, and was working on a Ph.D. at Rutgers University at the time of her death. She was a lecturer at Queens College and Fordham University, and Associate Director of Undergraduate Writing at Columbia University. In 2003, Rudnitsky won the Milton Kessler Memorial Poetry Prize. In her memory, the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Project has funded the publication of dozens of books of contemporary poetry, winners of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and the Lexi Rudnitsky Editors’ Choice Award.
A Doorless Knocking Into Night
Lexi Rudnitsky
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.
“A Doorless Knocking into Night possesses the imagination, intelligence, and technical mastery that readers hope to see in a freshman collection but don't always find. Rudnitsky shifts between loosely formal poems and tightly constructed sonnets, creating an insistent narrative of desire and release; here is a text that maps out the geography of Eros and shows Rudnitsky to have been a poet of tremendous promise.”
—Jehanne Dubrow, Prairie Schooner
Paperback / $19.00 (Can. $27.00) / ISBN 978-0-89255-651-9 / 112 pages / Poetry