SOURCE: Kinnahan, Linda A. “Reading Barbara Guest: The View from the Nineties.” In The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets, Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller, pp. 229-43. Orono, Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 2001.

In the following essay, Kinnahan offers an overview of recent critical assessment of the poetic work of Barbara Guest.

Miss Guest abolishes relationship, and consequently abolishes value. … Where Miss Guest abolishes relationship, Miss Plath asserts it as central.

-William Dickey (“Responsibilities” 758, 764)

While O'Hara's energetic celebration of the whole of life, in its dailiness, was a great permission giver, it was Guest's linguistic mysteries that lingered, composed and collaged from the precise fragments of her painterly witness and her skeptical wariness of language's confinement and oversimplification.

-Kathleen Fraser (“Tradition” 24)

… we don't know her. 

-Rachel Blau DuPlessis (“Flavor of Eyes” 23)

The remarkable retrieval of linguistically experimental women writing in this century...