Derelict Air gathers over 400 pages of previously uncollected poetry gleaned from ephemera, correspondence, and notebooks housed at numerous archives in the USA and UK. From Dorn's first Beat poems in 1952, to visionary juvenalia from his study at Black Mountain, to the long poems that were central to the development of the British Poetry Revival, and to translations of native texts from the Mayans and Aztecs, the transatlantic roots of Dorn's anti-capitalism are here fully visible. Robert Creeley wrote of Dorn that "No poet has been more painfully, movingly, political". Whereas Dorn's Collected Poems exhibits the poet that he became, Derelict Air reflects a career of becoming, full of unacknowledged successes in the diverse forms of the lyric, the pronouncement, the mock-epic, and the epigram. Recovering four lost books, Derelict Air significantly expands Dorn's oeuvre, including impassioned outbursts written during the Cuban missile crisis, illustrated bucolics for an unfinished children's book, "confetti poems" meant to shower the 1968 DNC, outtakes from his sci-fi epic Gunslinger, and a relentless extension of his nineties "stock ticker".Complete with scholarly endnotes, manuscript facsimiles, and a cover by the painter Raymond Obermayr, this substantial offering of Edward Dorn's poetry is a must-have for any reader interested in post-War American modernism.

Edward Dorn was born in Eastern Illinois in 1929 and grew up in rural poverty during the Great Depression. After two years at the University of Illinois, 'a set of circumstances and warps of destiny' took him to Black Mountain College, where he studied with Charles Olson. For several years he travelled through the far West of America, following the winds of writing and employment. In 1961 he became a teacher at the University of Idaho and saw the publication of his first book of poetry. Invited by Donald Davie in 1965 to join the faculty at the new University of Essex, he spent most of the next five years in England, where he wrote the first book of his epic Gunslinger. In the 1970s he taught at universities from Chicago to California, and again at Essex, before accepting a professorship in 1978 at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he directed the creative writing program, and continued teaching until his death in December 1999. He is the author of over forty books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and translation.