Eighteen years after the publication of her first book, Carla Harryman remains a difficult writer to place. One of the many challenges her writing presents is the question of genre. Of the ten books she has published, no two have been characterized under the same genre heading, and the range of her work includes plays, poetry, essays, experimental fiction, and serial prose poems. If there is a common thread connecting these works, it is an idea of poetry. In fact, one of Harryman's central achievements is to place the conventions of poetry (especially experimental poetry) in dialogue with the conventions of prose narrative, fiction, essays, and plays. In this dialogue, in which not only poetry but also narrative "might be thought to be a character," as she says in "Toy Boats" from Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays (1989), no genre is allowed a final triumph. Such a dialogue may...