This is a book sustained throughout by a complex and detailed argument about various literary relationships. Primarily it argues that surrealism is a key – though hidden – precursor to the experimental, theoretically driven, and self-consciously radical poetry that appeared in America in the 1970s and 1980s, “Language” poetry. It argues, too, that the relationship of “Language” writers to the surrealists (especially André Bréton) is mediated both through the work of American modernist poets such as William Carlos Williams, and through that of “objectivists” such as Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen. Though a tough argument to make, it is made well here, and convincingly carried out. Most welcome in this argument is that it is used to draw a series of wider relationships: between literary generations in the formation of a canon of American literature; between poetry and the politics of power; between writing, reading and ethical responsibility; between self and other. The book is self-consciously a provocation, demanding reassessments of surrealism's impact on American writing and a rethinking of “Language” writing's radical agenda, and of its impact on American poetics in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Most provocative is – perhaps – the choice of three poets focussed on in the book's second half. Though Barrett Watten sits easily within usual constructions of “Language” writing, Michael Palmer and Susan Howe do not (though they are commonly associated with it). This is clearly part of the point. Indeed, from the outset, the book seeks to avoid “petrify[ing] Language writing with definitive fixity” (2). Perhaps because of the self-reflexiveness about writing and literary allegiances that this promotes, the chapters on Palmer and Howe provide refreshing, and important, new readings of their work. Most successful is the chapter on Palmer, which demonstrates clearly and persuasively how the difficulties of his work are a necessary component of its ethical investment in poetry as a means of reading against the grain, against the logic of America's investment in an aggressive foreign policy. Reading closely Palmer's “Seven Poems within a Matrix for War,” the chapter develops a subtle and delicately traced examination of Palmer's “poetics of witness.” In its readings of Howe and Watten, too, the book attends – most usefully, most interestingly – to the ways in which experimental poetry in America has sought to unsettle the relationship between what we say as subjects and what history says about us.

This is an important book for anyone wanting to think beyond the critical commonplaces often applied to contemporary American poetry. It performs a strenuous argument, and makes some strenuous demands of its reader. But the effort is well worthwhile, highlighting as it does the reader's critical relationship with America's poetics, with the structures of power and radicalism that haunt the American imagination, and with the ethical challenges of our very act of “reading” America.