“You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop . . . nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911-79). That she worked in one of our country's least popular fields, poetry, doesn't matter. That she was a woman doesn't matter. That she was gay doesn't matter. That she was an alcoholic, and expatriate and essentially an orphan-none of this matters. What matters is that she left behind a body of work that teaches us, as Italo Calvino once said of literature generally, 'a method subtle and flexible enough to be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever.' The publication of Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, which gathers for the first time Bishop's unpublished material, isn't just a significant event in our poetry; it's part of a continuing alteration in the scale of American life . . . Quinn's notes throughout are superb . . . This is the devoted editing this material needed and deserved.” —David Orr, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)