Jenny Fenno's poetry rarely surprises the reader. The steady couplets and expected imagery of her roughly seventy poems tempt one to think her not unusual or remarkable as a writer, and literary history has largely pigeonholed her into a "between points of interest" place in American literature. The steady features of her poetry, however, form a background for the fifteen often-surprising prose works that close her Original Compositions, in Prose and Verse (1791). Though most of her prose topics are rehearsed in her poetry, her essays escape many of the less interesting conventions to which much of her poetry adheres. While Fenno might be best known as another "dead children gladly lead us into heaven" poet, she brought the sentimental death and "Night Thoughts" approach to the imagination at an early point in American literature. The perhaps unconscious eroticism of her embrace of God points to a debt owed...