Milo De Angelis is a sophisticated experimentalist who has set out to reinvent poetry in postmodern terms. His poems since the beginning of the 1970s draw on classical literature, existential phenomenology, and psychoanalysis but transform them according to the new conceptions of subjectivity and language that underlie poststructuralism. An early interest in Maurice Blanchot's critical speculations about the creative process and the nature of language and textuality led De Angelis to the study of Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Binswanger and finally to a belief in the overriding importance of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Lacan for contemporary poetry.

In De Angelis's writing, the Heideggerian attempt to overcome Western metaphysical tradition and discover an originary way of thinking about human existence is joined to several Nietzschean and Lacanian arguments, particularly the critique of morality and representation as potent inventions of "value" and "truth" and the exposure of subjectivity as a...