SOURCE: Fee, Margery. “Double Discourse.” Canadian Literature 126 (autumn 1990): 132-33.

In the following excerpt, Fee offers a positive review of Double Negative.

When Marlatt and Warland read from Double Negative at Mrs. Dalloway's Books in Kingston, they explained the book's origin as a way to share the experience of travelling from Sydney to Perth along the railway line that contains “the longest stretch of straight railway in the world.” Each wrote two poems a day and then they exchanged, discussed, and revised the results—at first with no thought of publication. Although Marlatt's poems alternate with Warland's, whose poem is whose is not clearly indicated, only one of the violations of convention in this collection:

walking into the diner ‘are you ladies alone’ 

                                                                                ‘no’ 

                                                                                                    ‘we're together’ 

Here are the two female negatives that make a positive, two Lesbian lovers who rewrite the train from inside as a womb, rather...