An unusual lyricism and descriptive engagement with the everyday world crucially establish Lyn Hejinian as a forceful contemporary poet. Hejinian is a founding figure of the language writing movement of the 1970s, and her work, like most language writing, enacts a poetics that is theoretically sophisticated, one that comments on and discusses such philosophical ideas as poststructuralist and deconstructive theory as it refigures the poem as information system or argument. While language writing is stylistically diverse and, as a movement, difficult to reduce to a particular style, most writers in this group are concerned with writing in nonstandardized, often nonnarrative, forms. Language writing is community-centered and often takes as its subject progressive politics and social theory. Hejinian's work, for example, is resolutely committed to exploring the political ramifications of the ways that language is typically used. But her work differs importantly from the traditional, identity-affirming political poem of...