"In her seven collections of poetry, Ann Lauterbach has won acclaim for poems that explore the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience of reality. Her range of formal strategies and her engagement with contemporary issues extend to her prose writings." "At the center of The Night Sky, her first collected work of nonfiction, is a series of seven essays that articulate the interstices between poetics, politics, and memoir. In these essays, by turns meditative and polemical, lyrical and descriptive, Lauterbach calls for a practical aesthetics, whereby the choices that are made in art and life are central to our sense of ourselves as agents in the world. Lauterbach advocates an active encounter with language, at once imaginative and practical; these writings demonstrate a radical relationship between how and what we know." "Cradling these essays are a wide range of meditations that touch upon the many ways in which art and poetry are integral and necessary to human conversation. Whether Lauterbach is articulating her own poetics of the whole fragment, analyzing the legacy of Emersonian thought, discussing the responsibility of the artist to engage the world, or offering illuminating considerations of important contemporary poets (Fanny Howe, Michael Palmer) and visual artists (John Currin, Gerhard Richter), she brings us to a new understanding of the relationship between self-knowledge and cultural meaning. The Night Sky offers a superlative introduction in prose to one of America's most agile minds."--Jacket.