A year after its publication, Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens has received a range of reviews which have either praised or dismissed the novel: the only constant has been the reviewer’s focus: naturally, given the genre, it is on plot, characters, point of view, as well as on how Lethem writes “the political.”

Andrea Rexilius’s excellent piece on Laura (Riding) Jackson, “Against the Commodity of the Poem,” published in Coldfront, makes me wonder how far or how little we have come over 40 years, in terms of the questions: what is the role of poetry and whom does it serve?

We are not a narrow tribe of men, with a bigoted Hebrew nationality—whose blood has been debased in the attempt to ennoble it, by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves.