Jean Osman's book, The Character shows us one answer to the question, "Is there poetry after L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry?" An impressive first book, it was the winner of the 1998 Barnard New Woman Poets Prize. In recent years, this prize has published increasingly interesting first books, with an emphasis on intelligent innovations in poetry.

        The Character is an exploration of questions as well as of terms and categories, exploring the nature of character, actor, and theater through language that has become "detached/attached"; one that "promotes transparency of emotion." Invoking King Lear, MacBeth and the innovative theater of Satie, this experimental "essay" in poetry explores language itself as the means of definition, hypothesis, and observation. Its humorous dissection of modernism via Eliot's The Wasteland questions the retainable nature of a fragmentation we have embraced.

        Some of the most interesting examinations look at the outcome of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry become language as science. "From The Periodic Table As Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist" is an exciting poem of charts, tables, and scientific and literary terminology; it is an alchemical wonder. Like the whole book, it turns on questions of eye sight and Heisenbergian principles, on Gloucester's blind truths, and a fascination in the process of experimentation, in the process of thought. Confident in voice(s), it is a visual exploration of textual conventions, of sign, and forms in the arena of play.