[4] During her lifetime, she published more than thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, essays, and collaborations.

[4] Other well-known works of hers include The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion : A Trilogy (North Point, 1991; Talisman, 1997), Dahlia's Iris: Secret Autobiography and Fiction (FC2), Sight (a collaboration with Lyn Hejinian; Edge Books), and Zither & Autobiography (Wesleyan University Press).

She had close ties to writers of the Beat movement, especially with those whose serious study of Buddhism influenced their writing and their vision of an ethical world.

In her writing, Leslie Scalapino's voice and vision were unprecedented, a product of her unique and rigorous intelligence and compassion.

She belonged to no school; her engagement with continual conceptual rebellion would have prohibited that.The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom was written by leafing through Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary choosing words at random by process of alexia, not as mental disorder but word-blindness: trance-like stream overriding meaning, choice, and inhibition.