I've been reading her fairly extensively for one of my poetry projects (an apprenticeship project) and I have to say she's pretty amazing. Her primary concern seems to be with the problems of language acquisition and translation, the insider-outsider dynamics of the same. These are pretty outrageously interesting topics to begin with and her approach to them is, well, you decide. In dance dance revolution (yes, that's a poetry collection) she sets the scene with two characters, the historian and the guide, who between them will explore the twisted linguistic landscapes of The Desert, a future city guided and guarded with wealth, wherein a great multiplicity of tongues meet mesh and merge in an ever-changing creole. From this strange linguiscape come poems like
The Hula Hooper's Taunt
I'mma a two-ton spiker hips fast rondeau
N'ere more, nay sayer feel this orbit rattle
Wipe that prattle that spittle crass pupa
Gupta away you ma' man,
where you revolving solving
spin shorty shark satellitic fever
Leer not, lyre I spiral atom pattern
Faster than you say my turn.
Go
here for the this and a few more poems from
Dance, dance revolution.
Suffice to say her work spans language in time and space and pulls it all together into a hypervocabulary, a sort of additive dialect, which by its self tension and heterogenous cohesion marks the depth and breadth of english and calls into question where our language sits and what it thinks of itself.
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