Author: Robert Zend Publisher: Delete Press (2025) Robert Zend’s Oāb is a visionary work that breaks new ground, even in today’s postmodern literary landscape. It is one of the great achievements of twentieth century avant-garde poetry and poetics. Blending the techniques of concrete poetry, visual art, collage, and, of course, the rich tradition of the modernist long poem, Oāb is perhaps the original hybrid text, questioning the boundaries of form and genre in ways that writers today can only aspire to. Epic in scale and form, cosmological in scope and ambition, and playful by nature, Oāb combines humor, ancient myth and spiritualisms, authorial self-reflexivity, various technologies, forms and philosophies until its organic brilliance assumes the mystique and guise of an originary codex. Far ahead of his time, Zend’s modern, exhaustive approach to intertextuality is unprecedented amongst the twentieth century’s post-war, North American poets. Originally published in two volumes by Exile Editions (1983 and 85), this is the first time that Oāb has been presented as the poet intended: under one cover, a single, epic, multi-media poem. It includes biographical and critical writing about Zend and his magnum opus.
