The first mistake one could make in attempting to understand the work of poet and critic Susan Stewart is to try and fit her in too small a box. Ms. Stewart's interests were perhaps best described by the MacArthur Foundation when they awarded her a fellowship; "Investigating themes such as miniaturization, giganticism, plagiarism, forgery, the souvenir, the collection, Stewart often makes strange and disorienting that which we usually take to be familiar and of common sense." It may serve to regard Ms. Stewart's writing as a synthesis of poetry and criticism in which language is so fluid and readable that it attains music quite apart from the ideas it conveys. Fascinating, subtle collisions of words and ideas or overlaps of nature and history might occur in a paragraph that describes a field. Suddenly the field is spinning outside itself to become more than a field of grass and flowers and smells and space to become a field of reference. It is a field of allusions to historical or Biblical fields. All the while, language flows effortlessly over an armature of intellectual insight which it conceals, envelopes, and nourishes as easily, comfortably, and necessarily as a body conceals its own skeleton. Susan Stewart holds a Ph.D. in folklore and folk life studies from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in poetry from Johns Hopkins University, and a B.A. in English and anthropology from Dickinson College. In addition to a MacArthur Foundation Award, her work has been recognized with a Lila Wallace-Readers' Digest Writer's Award and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Forest, The Hive, and Yellow Stars and Ice are among her published books of poetry. Her poems have appeared in many journals including: The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Harper's, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Beloit Poetry Journal. Stewart has also published books on literary and aesthetic theory including Crimes of Writing, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, and Nonsense. She is the Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and previously taught at Temple University.