Lyn Hejinian reads from My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Wesleyan University Press, 2013).

First published in 1980, Lyn Hejinian’s groundbreaking poem My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties.

An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language—the things people say and the ways they say them—shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.

Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, translator, and teacher. She is a founding figure of the Language writing movement and is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. She is a professor in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley.