SOURCE: "A Platoon of Poets," in Chicago, Vol. 128, No. 5, August, 1976, pp. 294-96.

In this mixed review of Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch, the critic praises Wakoski's imagery but criticizes her repetitiveness and a tendency toward self-parody.

Diane Wakoski, whose Dancing on the Grave of a Son Of A Bitch is her sixteenth book, is… at ease, established…. To be established in a place or a career, however, can mean being fixed, even stuck, as well as being comfortable and Wakoski, though she's a poet of unusual talent and vitality, seems to me to display a tendency toward staleness, flatness, repetitiveness in this book, a tendency, in other words, to self-parody. A fabulist, a weaver of gorgeous webs of imagery and a teller of archetypically glamorous tales, she's always attempted self-definition through self-mythologizing. "The poems were a way of inventing myself into a new...