A collection of poems and prose pieces circling the problem of historical knowledge. Language is not simply a vehicle for representing one's time, but a material force in its creation. Hence the poems attempt to investigate the boundaries between daily talk and the social environment.

Michael Davidson is director of the Archive for New Poetry at University of California in San Diego. Other books include The Arcades (O Books), The Prose of Fact (The Figures), Post Hoc (Avenue B), and The San Francisco Renaissance Cambridge UP).


"D's sentences are fragmentary and often non-syntactical, enveloping the reader in his process of exploring language, but his work conveys a sensitivity which is not often found in experimental writing."

--Library Journal


"Language fallen from three stories, sharp angles can surprise you. The cut bleeds & the phrasing's on the money"

--Poetry Project Newsletter


"The Landing of Rochambeau jettisons the post-structural anxieties evident in The Prose of Fact, returning to the promise of The Mutabilities with its consistently good-humored philosophical boisterousness"

--Jed Rasula, Sulfur


"...a grand adventure in the difficulty we have with words; that close to the difficulty we have with marriage and with living alone, the field of immediate experience the poems come from and return to. His wit is never disengaged or distancing from his passional reality that ultimately becomes our own passional reality, our continued possibility of keeping the roots of feeling alive and vulnerable."

--Robert Duncan