Cultural Writing. Literary Criticism. Includes essays on Carolyn Forche, Louise Gluck, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, C.K. Williams, Gail Mazur, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Bharati Mukherjee, Joyce Carol Oates, Rick Moody, Susan Sontag and more. "Robert Boyers is a highly individual critic, usefully eclectic in his approaches...I find him most stimulating and original, and...challenging to my own assumptions"--Harold Bloom. "...One of the few critics writing today who, by keeping his head about the claims of this or that modern poet or novelist, keeps our interest in them alive. Shrewd and sensible in his judgments, he can be very funny as well, not at the expense of the author under discussion, but to reveal something about the writer's predicament, and our own"-John Bayley.