[5] Madame X was Dennigan's second book, and it challenged, according to critic Arielle Greenberg, the conventional verse forms of poetry, without however going so far from the norm that it could have been considered something else.
[7] The narrators are each well-intentioned but flawed, voluble and blasphemous, charming and self-destructive; ranging from the head nurse of a hospice dealing with a nuclear holocaust to the girl who considers her boyfriend to be a genius because he believes that ancient astronauts built the pyramids.
[7][8] The blasphemy is exemplified by (for two examples) a modern pietà depicting "the Virgin mourning Christ as a miscarriage" and (in "Catholic School Reunion") the character stating that "I too would like to imagine sex and have my own Jesus.
"[7] The poems contain vulgarity and references to sexual deviancy, such as the one character who tells the reader that "But angels, burns are totally worth the pleasure of giving a light sabre a blow job."
[11] After a string of welcomes for various readers, including the "two lit-crit geeks up late at night who found this by googling John Barth", Dennigan recounts an anecdote about Gertrude Stein, explains her own teaching style, riffs on a quotation from Donald Barthelme, and says of the book that "Rather than studying it, you’d do better to tear out its pages, eat them, and let Dean Young’s excited ink stimulate your spleen into writing poems...".