Day Ocean State of Stars' Night: Poems & Writings 1989 & 1999-2006

Day Ocean State of Stars' Night, a collection of eight years of Leslie Scalapino's poetry, represents one of the most important of her works to date. Alice Notley commented on the long poem, "It's go in/quiet illumined grass/land": "An enlightened work singing of death, physical pain, social fearfulness, and where when or whether one is. The intricate variable stanza, almost danced (like a Greek strophe) sounds one of Scalapino's favorite themes: inside and outside, the cruelty outside and the illumination also there, as in here, in space and in time. The stanza leads one through the space and time of the poem word by word. You can't stop."

Robert Creeley has written about Leslie Scalapino's writing: "I hesitate to introduce any such term as 'meditation' or 'reflection,' because this work is not apart from its thinking and/or composition, so to speak,and that, among other things, constitutes its exceptional value. I find the whole work to be a deeply engaging pre-occupation with, and articulation of, what life might be said, factually, to be. But not as a defined subject, nor even a defining one-but as one being one. That is an heroic undertaking, or rather, place in which to work/write/live. Its formal authority is as brilliant as any I know."

Leslie Scalapino lives in Oakland, California. Among her many other books are Considering how exaggerated music is, that they were on the beach, way, Crowd and not evening or light, New Time, The Front Matter/Dead Souls, and—available from Green Integer—Defoe.