From Library Journal
As a student, Fraser read only the male Modernists, but when she became a working poet herself and began to notice that her peers were being omitted from anthologies, she went back to see what had been hidden from her earlier and discovered writers like Mina Loy, H.D., Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. The "startling alternatives" these female Modernists provided became, for Fraser and her contemporaries, "part of our survival as writers." With these authors in mind as well as such diverse role models as Wallace Stevens (who demonstrates "the unequal pleasure of reinventing one's idiom") and Madame Curie (depicted in the Greer Garson movie as "looking for imagined light in the dark of her lab"), Fraser went on to become a professor at San Francisco State University, an accomplished poet, and editor of the journal HOW(ever) and its online successor, HOW2. Combining autobiography and criticism, her essays have none of the peevish resentment that too often mars purely theoretical writings on women's place in the canon; instead, hers is a clear-eyed history of an important cultural struggle told by a passionate, intelligent combatant.ADavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

An accomplished and influential poet, Kathleen Fraser has been instrumental in drawing attention to other women poets working outside the mainstream. Translating the Unspeakable gathers eighteen of her essays written over nearly twenty years, combining autobiography and criticism to examine what it means for any artist to innovate instead of following an already traveled path.

Fraser tells how her generation was influenced by revolutions in art and philosophy during the early 1960s and how she spent years pursuing idiosyncratic means of rediscovering the poem's terms. By the 1970s her evolving poetics were challenged by questions of gender, until immersion in feminist/modernist scholarship led her to initiate greater dialogue among experimentalist poets.