"Technicians of the Sacred presents 'primitive' and ancient poetries as the incantations they are, loaded with power and very full of the magic that invests all good poetry. A fresh, ingenious selection of ritual and sacred poetry from around the world, translated with irreverence and raw attitude. Rothenberg finds incredibly powerful language in places where it wouldn't occur to most people to look, and he's not afraid of crudeness and hilarity" --publisher.

"A wide-ranging anthology of ethnopoetry including origin texts, visionary texts, texts about death, texts about events--collected from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Ancient Near East, and Oceania."--Provided by publiher.

"Technicians of the Sacred presents 'primitive' and ancient poetries as the incantations they are, loaded with power and very full of the magic that invests all good poetry. The treatment is fascinating...the commentaries are a gold mine of responses to the material by a strong poet (the editor), and his selection of analogous writings from a broad range of contemporary poets."—David P. McAllester

EDWARD L. SCHIEFFELIN: From The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers

'This book represents a major effort to bring Amerindian poetry to the reader in such a way that the total poetry, the dance, the vowel changes, the pauses, the movement, the interaction between speaker and audience is made evident...' -John Demos, Library Journal