Poetry. A survey of the life's work of one of America's most original avant-garde poets and playwrights."Rochelle Owens's writing is sui generis, brilliantly inventive, immensely learned, sophisticated, and witty in its conceits. She is, in many ways, a proto-language poet, her marked ellipses, syntactic oddities, and dense and clashing verbal surfaces. Hers is a universe of stark gesture, lightning flash, and judgment, a poetic microstructure in its superb modulations of rhythms and internal rhymes, its ironies and paradoxes. In its uncompromising savagery, its passionate rejection of sentimentality, Owens's lyric voice is unique among contemporary poets. An astonishing body of work."--Marjorie Perloff