Anarchism is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end of 1925, when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson.

Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria. Long out of print and now...

The poems in "Paradise for Everyone" transact embrained feeling and transform, via belief, possibilities of reference. Here, and here, the person becomes language, and language is an actor fully fleshed, whose words and bodies name and rearrange the poem's conditions. The book's sections are organized to suggest movement, not so much a narrative or progress as a cycling through of events, of compulsion, vision, desire, ruin, multiplicity. Each poem has an ongoing urge to self-difference as it dreams, travels, and exchanges attributes with locales and objects. That urge generates the...

In the Comte de Lautreamont's Les Chants de Maldoror (1868), the hero copulates with a female shark in the frenzied sea of a shipwreck. Tender Girl invents a daughter as the offspring of that coupling. A visceral Little Mermaid, Girl comes out from ocean and crosses the land of the father, finding speech, sex, law, violence, and art."

This book records a sustained plunge into the imaginative elixir of a dream. The dream starts with a waking vision - 'the door of the train flew open' - and continues as reverberations in the sensorium, the seat of felt thought. With the sonnet as its anchor note, the symphony blends the machine's body and the garden, crash and after-sound.