Editor Robert J. Bertholf has taken three core essays from Fictive Certainties (1985), an earlier prose collection that was limited to works written after 1955; to these have been added a variety of Duncan’s writings on contemporary artists and such fellow poets as Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer. Included as well are Rites of Participation,
an excerpt from the still unpublished H.D. Book ; a long meditation on Edmond Jabes’ The Book of Questions, and a revised version of Duncan’s controversial and provocative essay of 1944, The Homosexual in Society.