Collected Greed Parts 1-13

Wakoski's unified poetic vision has earned her a distinguished position in contemporary American literature. Her poems are personal narratives through which she weaves repeated images and themes, forming a rich texture of metaphor and critical reflection based in individual experience. Wakoski describes the poet's mission as "carving out a territory, creating the subject matter or content which helps to the reader to identify his voice or style as poet." For Wakoski, this poetic territory is based on the events of her own life, but the resulting work transcends the limitations of factual representation in order to emphasize the most interesting and universal qualities related to the experience.