SOURCE: Kasper, Catherine. Review of Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature. Chicago Review 47, no. 3 (fall 2001): 145-48.

In the following essay, Kasper offers a review of Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature.

Rocks on a Platter contains some of Barbara Guest's most obscure and compelling lines since Defensive Rapture (1993). It has been interpreted by other reviewers as one long poem that examines the “implacable poet” as subject and vector in the process of creative production. While that may be the case, these poems are also literally “notes” on literature, as its subtitle suggests. The book can be seen as Guest's own jottings in response to her inspiring and eclectic research, with texts dissected and arranged to become poetic objects resonating as in a still-life painting.

Guest was one of the central members of the New York School, though David Lehman (in The Last Avant-Garde) omits her in...