“In a 1957 review of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation, the poet John Ashbery wrote that Stein’s verse was interesting because it contained all the fallibility of people themselves. Her lines were “annoying or brilliant or tedious.” Stein was prone to stopping short in the middle of a sentence to wander the waking world. Her lines kept you at arm’s length.
Over the course of the last decade, J”
