SOURCE: Kaufman, Robert. “A Future for Modernism: Barbara Guest's Recent Poetry.” The American Poetry Review 29, no. 4 (July-August 2000): 11-16.

In the following essay, Kaufman examines how Guest's poetry “dramatizes this critical process of discovering reality by means of lyric negation” and he predicts that the poet's reception among readers and critics will continue to grow.

Remember Borges' great figure Pierre Menard? The difficult Symboliste poet was discovered to have written—not to have copied, parodied, or pastiched, but actually to have imagined and written, word for word and line by line—nothing less than the Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes. Now consider a Borgesian tale that, in complex fidelity to our own moment, goes Borges one better, establishing itself not only as true fiction but as true fact:

For decades, a brilliant poet is excluded from American poetry's higher honors and publicity loops, excluded as well from a surprising...