As director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University from 1973 through 1975, founder of the American Poetry Archives (possibly the largest collection of audio-and videotape recordings by contemporary poets in North America), and founding editor of HOW(ever) (1983-1991), a much-imitated radical journal of women's innovative poetry, Kathleen Fraser has had an important influence on American poetry and poetics for a quarter century. That her work nevertheless remains little recognized is at least in part a direct result of her own decision, after the publication of New Shoes by Harper and Row in 1978, to withhold all her future work from major New York trade publishing companies in favor of little magazines and small private presses. Her earliest work appeared in such well-established and prestigious journals as Poetry (Chicago), The New Yorker , The Hudson Review, The Nation, and Mademoiselle. Since the mid 1970s, however, Fraser has chosen to...