SOURCE: Redel, Victoria. “We Want to Be Moved.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (31 March 1996): 11.

In the following review, Redel highlights the main themes of Art Objects.

It was a sign of lonely maturation for me as a reader when I came to understand that the writers I most loved, whose poems or stories I read talismanically over and over, whose language helped me construct the truths by which I lived, were often people I would not want to spend five minutes chatting with, let alone engaging in any conversation of social or personal substance.

First this made me sad.

Then it made me brazen.

I had learned that I could love the work and not the writer, I could love her language but not her life or, even, her ideas. I could love the triumph of one writer's book and the difficult failures of his next book. In...