Long active on the New York art scene (she helped edit Art News from 1951 to 1954), Barbara Guest is "commonly considered the finest fruit of the New York school of poets," according to critic Alicia Ostriker, although one of its supposed members has observed that the only thing certain about that school is that it never existed. Guest first met James Schuyler and Frank O'Hara in the early 1950s and worked with John Bernard Myer's Artists' Theatre. This loosely knit group was later joined by Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery. While her work perhaps most closely resembles Ashbery's (like him, she has been influenced by drama as well as art and composes subtly modulated poems for many voices), interest in Guest's poetry has dwindled somewhat in recent years, at least in the United States, perhaps because it does not appeal to popular tastes or easily fit into feminist canons...