Changing Subjects contends that major American poets-such as Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and Lyn Hejinian-transformed verse and even changed conceptions of modern subjectivity by exploiting an ordinary rhetorical device, ubiquitous in spoken language: the digression.
Focusing on the related concepts of digression and drift, Reddy makes a deeply impressive case for a creative continuum among some of America's most significant and challenging poets from Whitman through Stevens to Moore, Ashbery, O'Hara and Hejinian, among others. He grounds his project not only in certain writings of Foucault, but also in aspects of Enlightenment thought, and thereby illuminates an exploratory, constantly metamorphosing stance toward the world and
experience, one that poetry is singularly equipped to offer.
