Lorine Niedecker

"The Bront s had their moors, I have my marshes," Lorine Niedecker wrote of flood-prone Black Hawk Island in Wisconsin, where she lived most of her life. Niedecker is one of the most important poets of her generation and an essential member of the Objectivist circle. Her life by water, as she called it, could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene where she also made a home.

Niedecker was also a major woman poet who interrogated issues of gender, domesticity, work, marriage, and sexual politics long before the modern feminist movement. Her work attracted high praise from her peers--Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, Clayton Eshleman--with whom she exchanged life-sustaining letters. Her marginal status, both geographically and as a woman, translates into a major poetry.Niedecker's lyric voice is one of the most subtle