A meditative landscape populated and depopulated by real and allegorical episodes. It jolts us out of our habits and into play among meanings. We participate in constructing new experience out of the language, out of realizing its place in social life.

Stephen Rodefer's books of poetry include Four Lectures (The Figures, 1981, co-winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award) and Emergency Measures (The Figures, 1987). He has also translated Villon, Sappho and selections from the Greek Anthology.


"Very SOLID, GREAT and useful satiric ploy with bedrock concerns. Grab Four Lectures, it's possibly the last real sense you'll be offered."

--Robert Creeley


"Part carnival, part war, the clamor of the world is loud in these works, submitted by a rigorous and passionate intellect to the clarifies which only language can yield from details this fast and dense. Philosopher-harlequin, the poet speaks plainly, having just now invented the line. What other writer can give us this much of the real?"

--Ron Silliman


"Brilliant and melancholy elegies ... complex and rhapsodic."

--San Francisco Review of Books


"I've read Villon three times in one day and it is superb!"

--Brion Gysin


"Rodefer's stanzas are crammed full of the inconvenient baggage of everyday life, a future archaeologist's dream ... startling and original, they are the veritable thing."

--Imre Salusenszky, Times Literary Supplement