"Early on she quotes a remark of his about how a poem manages to make sense: “There is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction.” Like George, Mary [Oppen] was as attuned to understanding the dynamics of a moment of conviction as she was wary of turning it into an imperative about how to write or what to think. Life is lived, art created and responsibility renewed through a constant, often painstaking sense of readjustment from moment to moment, word to word, conviction to conviction. The concision, clarity and candor with which Mary describes such moments of readjustment, and her and George’s lives more generally, is the signature of Meaning a Life." John Palattella The Point