Eileen Myles is one of the few openly lesbian American poets of her time to attract the interest of aestheticians as well as a general readership. Part of this rare accessibility is surely due to her having worked so successfully in multiple genres while always evincing a consistency of voice and clarity of purpose. Foremost of her achievements, however, is the stature of her work in poetry. Nurtured by the avant-garde and a firm grounding in diverse American traditions as exemplified by Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, and Language poetry, Myles has brought lesbian content and political activism to the so-called New York School poem and a thoroughly postmodern, if not somewhat confrontational, view to the problem of identity in twentieth-century American poetry. Such a varied poetic genealogy makes it difficult, or perhaps unnecessary, to place Myles's poetry into any one category; at...