In a prologue to The Europe of Trusts (1990) Howe writes of her desire to speak for those who have been silenced by history: "I wish I could tenderly lift, from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted--inarticulate." Her poetry attests to the difficulty of the process of representing, of recovering by an act of the imagination, the speech of those left out and left homeless by official documents, often including the official documents of academic literary canons. Howe employs both formal and discursive practices that call into question the binary structures of language and even the adequacy of language. She makes extraordinary demands on a reader by using fragmentary syntax and by deliberately disregarding the poetic and linguistic conventions that readers depend on to find their way through poems. But she expands the range of who can be included in the poetic landscape, and she...