Saga / Circus, by the esteemed poet Lyn Hejinian, brings us two distinctly different long poems in which the tropes of narrative and lyric—their feints and demands—stake claims amongst the actual characters presented. In this playful yet penetrating pair of poems, it is the character of Lyn Hejinian's thought meeting our character of thought that is one of the most exciting and most constant dramatic events of the book—the richly sensational & subversive crescendos register as both melodic and discordant soundtrack.

LYN HEJINIAN is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her groundbreaking book of poetry, My Life, published by Sun & Moon / Green Integer, has had five re-printings from 1980-2002. Her most recent books include A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001), Slowly and The Beginner (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), and The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003). The University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. In the spring of 2007, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.