The Mundus by N. H. Pritchard

The Mundus by N. H. Pritchard
Edited by Paul Stephens
October 2024: Primary Information

From the back jacket:
N.H. Pritchard's The Mundus is a lost masterpiece of visual poetry and the Black Arts Movement. Composed between 1965 and 1971, The Mundus represents a unique visual and sonic landscape that is by turns material and poetic, literary and mystical. Pritchard himself described the text as "a novel with voices" and "an exploded haiku." Like The Matrix, his previous masterwork, The Mundus bears the imprint of free jazz and other avant-garde movements of the late 1960s, and builds upon Pritchard's poetic innovations as it proceeds in small leaps and sublime ruptures. stuttering across the page with sonic and typographic momentum. Rejected by editors during Pritchard's lifetime, this edition of The Mundus finally grants readers a glimpse of the poet at his most radical and revelatory, exploring a spiritual terrain he enigmatically dubbed the "transreal." As perplexing and profound today as when it was written, The Mundus plunges readers into a mesmerizing textscape that must be sounded out not only with the mind, but also with the voice, body, and soul. 
 
Read below the letter that Pritchard wrote in 1967 describing The Mundus. Reprinted with permission from the Estate of N.H. Pritchard.