The byplay in Wakoski's [The Man Who Shook Hands], getting around to the story of the man who shook hands, is bad Ponge. But the story is wonderfully moving, not from the digressions ("motion which suspends motion") but from the good Wakoski knack of taking the time to get it right. In writing time usually means space; while she mentions the "bourgeois" fear that one will be misprised or laughed at, she doesn't mention the equally bourgeois fear that one taxes a reader with too many words. She takes the time, and that is a fraction how she can write good long-line poems. (p. 303)

Her trouble in art used to be the brutality or too merely literary embarrassment (not to mention a kind of betrayal) of conducting her life in public…. Reading her is a mixture of the pity she really seems to want and the admiration she...