Juliana Spahr's first full-length c...

Juliana Spahr's first full-length collection is in many regards a literary contradiction. For although Spahr evinces an impeccable knowledge of contemporary theory with its penchant for devaluing emotive meaning, her work is in no way a simple exercise in the problematics of language. Perhaps responding to what Harold flowering calls "a tradition too wealthy to ne anything more,"(1) Spahr abandons a contemporary poetics obsess with the accrual of mode of address insisting instead on a plain, anti-lyrical poetics of witness.
In the opening lines of the work Spahr speaks directly ...