Among the most prominent of contemporary avant-garde poets, Leslie Scalapino writes poetry, prose, plays, and critical essays that challenge the reader to reconceive literary form and its relation to both personal experience and cultural politics. Her book-length poems, fragmented and minimalist, reveal Scalapino's ties to practitioners of Language writing--including Barrett Watten, Robert Grenier, Carla Harryman, and Lyn Hejinian, all of whom she has written about. Like other poets linked to the Language group or, more broadly, to the Objectivist tradition, Scalapino disputes the primacy granted to the ego in much recent American poetry and initiates instead an innovative poetics of meticulous observation. In Objects in the Terrifying Tense / Longing from Taking Place (1994) Scalapino explains her view that "The current culture is produced in one as one's inner self." That "inner self" is profoundly in question in Scalapino's work: conventional subjectivity is replaced with what she whimsically calls the...