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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

The Cell

Lyn Hejinian

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A Sun & Moon title.

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Lyn Hejinian is one of today's most esteemed and widely read poets. Her poetic autobiography, My Life, has gained an almost legendary reputation, and is taught in many university and college courses. The Cell, her latest poetic sequence, was written over a period of her life from October 6, 1986, to January 21, 1989, a time of exploration of the relation of the self to the world, of the objective "person" to the subjective being "as private as my arm." As the title suggests, "the Cell" of this work connotes several things, some contradictory: biological life, imprisonment, closure, and circulation. But it is just the relationships and oppositions of these that Hejinian searches out in a poetry that, like her previous work, displays a magical blend of logic and contradiction, of narrative impetus stopped in its tracks by aphoristic wit.

These poems will continue to establish her as the inheritor of the rich and intense language of American writers such as Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickinson.

Lyn Hejinian lives in Berkeley, California with her husband, the jazz saxophonist Larry Ochs. She is also the author of Writing Is an Aid to Memory, Gesauldo, Redo, The Guard, and Oxota: A Short Russian Novel. She has also translated the contemporary Soviet poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko.