One can't talk about this book without making mention of its remarkable structure and history: it was intially written when Ms. Hejinian was thirty-seven, and it consisted of thirty-seven poems, each one containing impressions drawn from the corresponding year of her life. Each of these poems was composed of thirty-seven sentences, as well.

Eight years later, when Ms. Hejinian was forty-five, she revised My Life, adding eight new poems (to bring the total up to forty-five) and inserting eight new sentences into each of the previous poems, adding a new layer of understanding and complexity to the earlier work and questioning the idea that a piece of writing (or the evolution of the self) can ever be "finished."

Additionally, the details that she focuses on in these poems and the way these details are ordered comprise a quiet subversion of traditional biographical structure. Ms. Hejinian avoids the normal biographical trajectories-- "here's how I became a success" or "here are the most important events in my life" -- instead she focuses on minutae like the pattern of tiles in a floor. She also resists the impulse to explain whether these details influenced her later self or even why they are important at all, leaving much up to the reader to determine.

This all contributes to making this a wonderful, astonishing, surprising book; a new way of investigating the experience of being human.

If you want prose and postmodern poetry which hasn't lost the integrity and beauty of image, then bring your intellectual shovel and dig in. Don't let postmodernism ruffle your feathers until you've let dutch rub you.

this modern soviet poet breathes passion into everyday concsiousness.the dreams of the surreal possess his soul.the sound of the words read like much meaning.truely inspirational perception that will change how you see everything.wallace stevens meets william burroughs.borges.cortazar.you must have "xenia"&"desciption".what ive come to expect from sun & moon[press]...classics!perfect along side of bob dylan or w.c.williams in the coffeehouse style madness.leaves you craving more. radical.druid/gypsy/priestess.untill you are me & i am you

Happily is a long / short poem (about 40 pages) in which Hejinian's "language of inquiry" tackles one of the more prevelant inquiries a person is bound to undertake: happiness. Happiness does not equal banality or "prettiness." In fact, in "Happily," Hejinian has distilled the sensuality of reason, the phenomenology of history / chronology, and the last century (from Stein to Mac Low) of poetic experiment and cleared space for a new conception of beauty. One which is pointed, poignant, and pleasantly difficult -- the poem posits happiness as a choice implicating a context: "history with a future" -- the book is necessary. And that's more than I can say for many other books on the subject.

Written by Viktor Shklovsky, a leading figure in the Russian Formalist movement in the 1920s, Third Factory is an engaging literary narrative translated from Russian into English by Richard Sheldon. Part memoir, part political allegory, part personal anecdote and part novel, Third Factory is replete with thought-provoking conundrums arising from a complex and imperfect world, as summarized in the three "factories" of life, which form the core of this engaging and erudite work. Enhanced with an Afterword by Lyn Hejinian and an informative introduction by Richard Sheldon, Third Factory is an especially recommended reading for students of 20th Century Russian Literature.

These are dense, stimulating essays by one of the most articulate and accessible of the "Language Poets."