If in Time: Selected Poems, 1975-2000 (Penguin Poets)

Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most inventive and admired poets. Since the mid-1970s, she has explored the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience. By turns elegiac, fierce, and sensuous, her musically-charged poems subvert distinctions between narrative coherence and fragmentary elision, between outward attention and inward response. Throughout, Lauterbach questions the hope for personal agency within proliferating fields of cultural and historical event. If In Time brings together selections from each of her first five collections, as well as an exhilarating group of new poems.