In the three decades since his first magazine publication in 1969 Bob Perelman has played a significant role in defining a formally adventurous, politically explicit poetic practice in the United States. From the start his work has called into question key presuppositions of contemporary mainstream poetry: the belief that poems must reflect the private experience of isolated individuals, for instance, or that the literary artifact stands in regal autonomy, somehow above and apart from social life. Availing himself of a variety of forms, from the conventional essay to the dramatic monologue, from the carefully measured units of verse to the giddily hybrid pleasures of all manner of counterfeiture--including mimicry, hallucination, ventriloquism, and fabricated dreams--Perelman has pressed toward a poetry of radical deconcealment, searching for the deep structure of social experience beyond the epiphenomenal shell game of postmodernity. His work asks us to

Imagine a poetry that is not necessarily...