Hejinian, a "partisan of the Language School and the New York poets", according to Jacob Stockinger, editor of the culture desk at The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, "seems to have gotten caught up in a poet-as-political activist or social commentator point of view [...] Perhaps that's why she even seems hostile to the notion of beauty, favoring relevance instead."
Stockinger found much of the poetry in the volume, a "graduate school inscrutability without either meaning or music."
Some of the pleasant surprises in the volume, for Stockinger, were "Here 2" by Bob Perelman and Jean Day's "Prose of the World Order".
[1] Ron Smith, writer-in-residence at St. Christopher's School and director of its Writers Institute, wrote in the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the strong points of the collection are its "wit, humor and comedy".
Smith thought the volume's best poems were the contributions from Kim Addonizio, Craig Arnold, Billy Collins, Carla Harryman, Jane Hirshfield, Danielle Pafunda, James Tate, Paul Violi, and David Wagoner.