A fascinating and effective mélange of literary criticism, memoir and poetry by a young woman, Harvard-educated and UK-experienced, bisexual, divorced and still searching. Exploring her favorite poets through extensive quotation and biographical detail, she adopts their styles to write her own poems, chapter by chapter on Chaucer, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., Louise Glück, Fanny Howe, Emily Dickinson, and Shelley. Add to that an Abcedary and two chapters of “cantos” and it’s an outstanding collection. Description of her Harvard Studies with Helen Vendler (“Clear, if intricate, sailing”) and William Corbett (“high voltage…revealed the limits of close reading”)—explanation and experience, respectively. Shock of the new—“a modernist mantra”—kept popping up with Corbett (Auster’s Winter) and Susan Stewart (Lily’s Revenge).