I was reading from Locale by Jessica Grim last night. I meant no disrespect to her when I snided about Ron Silliman's blurb. Gary Sullivan's point about blurbs, that they will be read by those who will read them, essentially, as in: they mean to meet a circuscribed audience: I think it is an apt point. Jessica Grim's work represents just one 21th century. you think of the 20th century and might posit Stein, Pound, Zukofsky, Olson, Ginsberg perhaps as definitive threads in the century's letters. which list betrays anglocentrism but that aside, it's something of a parlour game, one that seems unneeded. Grim's writing, then, reveals (slowly) a hermetic flakiness. her work is doggeddly to the point yet doesn't flourish in a way that is obvious. her effects are not like Niedecker or Zukofsky but she shows a similiar careful restraint in production. her poems have a chipped away sense to them, not expansive. I would locate her as somewhat affected by Williams. perhaps it is me, for sometimes I can be dense, but her lines don't always seem musically strong. she likes the possibility of enjambment, but her endlines also often offer a full stop feel (she uses little punctuation, almost randomly). the score is confusing, but as I said, maybe I'm dense. she might be, like Michael Gizzi, a poet whose work comes better to light once one has heard it read aloud. this book is absoltively all I've read by her. it made me think of Jeff Harrison's work, tho his is located in a weird pre-post 18th century literary landscape that adds an exotic sheen to his procedures. there's a lot of muscle in both writers' work.