Denise Riley is renowned as a feminist theorist and a poet and for her remarkable refiguring of familiar but intransigent problems of identity, expression, language, and politics. In Impersonal Passion, she turns to everyday complex emotional and philosophical problems of speaking and listening. Her provocative meditations suggest that while the emotional power of language is impersonal, this impersonality paradoxically constitutes the personal.

In nine linked essays, Riley deftly unravels the rhetoric of life s absurdities and urgencies, its comforts and embarrassments, to...

A collection of essays and some related poems by almost 30 contemporary poets who have worked for years outside the "mainstream" of British publishing. Many are or have been small-press publishers and editors too.

Denise Riley has pursued her singular path with a determined disregard for poetic fashion: a poet of immense musical gifts and formal skill, as happy in traditional forms as experimental, her non-alignment with any `tribe' has led to a rich and various poetry that, while densely allusive and intellectually uncompromising, remains emotionally open towards the reader at the most profound level. Say Something Back, her lyric meditation on bereavement, won Riley universal acclaim - and a wide and long-deserved readership. Her Selected Poems offers a generous overview of a working life which has...