Poetry. A READING 18-20 continues Beverly Dahlen's remarkable serial poem and its ever-shifting reading of the world, other texts, other people. At times like a diary in fragments, the work herein shifts between serious philosophical engagement and thoroughly contemporary lyric, with shards of autobiography and personal reflection thrown in to create a polyvalent text that touches many tonal registers. "In a world where the lunatic fringe becomes the entire cloth, language becomes an incoherent agent of the State. But A READING 18-20 makes something legible that exceeds that agent's grasp, something words didn't make, something really here, with us, under the erasure of the world that is our world. This installment of Beverly Dahlen's great long poem continues her ongoing work of deciphering the sacrifice we've made of our lives to a world undone by the need for belief in the coherence of system"-Rob Halpern. "There's a sphinx-like allure to the work of Beverly Dahlen, she intuits so much we haven't yet fathomed. Reading to write, writing through reading, her syncretic epistemology takes on mother, father, erasure, identity, philosophy, philology, history, war, the 'local' in parallel readings/queries of Engels, Derrida, Kristeva, Watten, Spicer, others.These three very different sections of A READING 18-20 are long overdue in book form, and will be in the hands of all my students soon. This book is a survival, a summons. Brava, Beverly, brava!"-Anne Waldman.

Beverly Dahlen is a native of Portland, Oregon, Beverly Dahlen has lived in San Francisco for many years. Her first book, Out of the Third, was published by Momo's Press in 1974. Two chapbooks, A Letter at Easter (Effie's Press, 1976) and The Egyptian Poems (Hipparchia Press, 1983) were followed by the publication of the first volume of A Reading in 1985 (A Reading 1-7, Momo's Press). Since then, three more volumes of A Reading have appeared. Chax Press published A Reading 8-10 (1992); Potes and Poets Press: A Reading 11-17 (1989); Instance Press: A Reading 18-20 (2006). Chax Press also published the chapbook A-reading Spicer & Eighteen Sonnets in 2004. Ms. Dahlen has also published work in numerous periodicals and anthologies. A forthcoming issue of Crayon will publish poetry and her essay on beauty.