This collection of essays offers twelve innovative approaches to contemporary literary criticism. The contributors, women scholars who range from undergraduate students to contingent faculty to endowed chairs, stage a critical dialogue that raises vital questions about the aims and forms of criticism- its discourses and politics, as well as the personal, institutional, and economic conditions of its production. Offering compelling feminist and queer readings of avant-garde twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, the essays included here are playful, performative, and theoretically savvy.

1 Critical Play: An Introduction.- 2 Ecological Echoing: Following the Footsteps.- 3 Carole Maso's AVA and the Practice of Reading: Selves in Dialogue.- 4 Expert Witness: Living in the Dirt.- 5 Blah Blah Bleh: Bulimic Writing as Resistance.- 6 "In the Soul of the Sidereal World": Mining Barbara Hodgson and Claudia Cohen's The WunderCabinet for a Critical Model of Interdisciplinary Curiosity.- 7 Reading and Writing in Kristjana Gunnars's Rose Garden.- 8 The Water Will Hold You: On Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water.- 9 Writing a Sacred Self: Kathy Acker and Wonder / Amy Nolan.- 10 Impulses Toward a Telepathic Reading of Clarice Lispector's The Stations of the Body and "The Beak of a Bird" by Amina Cain.- 11 Still Life with My Grandmother's China: Mark Doty and the Lyric Essay.- 12 Lessons from Lying: Autobiographical Performances and the Conventions of Nonfiction.- 13 Take 12: A Critical Performance.