Much has been said about the virtues of active reading but how much poetry really draws the mind's to read in every possible direction on the page, to puzzle and configure as it goes in sensual and intellectual and ecstatic pleasure? Jenny Gough's "Fair Copy Book" does this in its vocabularies of history and wit and terror--using Wollstonecraft, Shelly, Rousseau and much more than meets the eye and ear thus opened and alert, ready to navigate an "interlineated abyss" in at least 16 lineaments of linguistic joy. Toward--is it "Ocean res" or "resorts obscured by the sun"? Both, of course. The arrow of time stops and goes in both directions by chance and intention in this astonishing composition.
--Joan Retallack

Jenny Gough has written an original, unusual, passionate book, saturated with historical and textual resonance. The stakes of this work are very high--the whole poetic tradition is put into, pulled into play, including the notion of the line, the issue of sonnet, the female figure in culture, the center and the margin, and erasure and presence. This book is a tour de force of the intellectual and vibrant possession of a lyric tradition.
--Rachel Blau DuPlessis