The Unfollowing is a sequence of elegies, mourning public as well as personal loss. The grief is not coherent. Though the poems are each fourteen lines long, they are not sonnets but anti-sonnets. They are composed entirely of non sequiturs, with the intention of demonstrating, if not achieving, a refusal to follow aesthetic proprieties, and a rejection of the logic of mortality and of capitalism. Outrage, hilarity, anxiety, and ribaldry are not easily separated in the play of human emotions. And they are all the proper, anarchic medium for staying alive.

LYN HEJINIAN is a poet, essayist, teacher, and translator. Her academic work is addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. She is also involved in anti-privatization activism at the University of California, Berkeley, where she serves as the John F. Hotchkis Professor of English.