Positions of the Sun

Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun is a book of twenty-six interlocking “essays with characters” that explores the mid-2000s financial “crisis” through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area. In Positions, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever’s needed in her to approach to the subject—whether the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship’s critical patchwork, or dramatis personae set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative. 

'More than ever, it seems to me, Lyn Hejinian, by positioning the sun, has sunk her thoughts in her everyday perceptions to capture the continuity of a reality that, in spite of her most concentrated attention, keeps eluding her, (and us). Her present work results in a poetic emanation that creates a celestial map where the sun, discreetly, appears, here and there, and illuminates, like her own mind does, everything it touches, and moves on with it. Yes, “thought is a polyphonic awareness,” as she says, and by including this solar dimension she redeems the (pathetic) totality of the whole landscape.' – Etel Adnan