Reading political poems from another era can sometimes feel like stumbling upon a vintage porn magazine in the park: embarrassingly analog, inexplicit, naive. Passion distilled in a different time.

Not so with Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, which has been reissued as a fiftieth anniversary edition with a new introduction by the feminist scholar Sophie Lewis. “Over the last ten years, the Letters have circulated via text message and social media,” Lewis writes, “like Diane’s cocaine-laced joints.” The struggles that di Prima wrestled with in these lyrical tirades remain our own half a century on.

Letter #16 begins, “we are eating up the planet,” before explaining how industrial poisons contaminate the world’s ecologies for future generations. Letter #61, a response to the 1973 energy crisis, exposes the vulnerability of a scarce economy under capitalism: the “grim austerity consciousness / empty shelves and stiff upper lip.”