... by the county inspector after a nasty problem emerges concerning human waste management. Alaska thus becomes a refuge for the characters, who occupy themselves by making love and getting high while trying to live off the land with the little knowledge they have. In chronicling the contradictions of the modern...

... of a palimpsest, on a page torn from Nikolay Gogol. Given the very discursive, literary mind-­set McCandless took with him into Alaska, such an intertextual end seems entirely, if sadly, apt. One of the central ironies of McCandless’s life was that he strove so earnestly for a pure, unmediated...

..., as in: "Alaska / is the Raquel Welch / of landscape" (YL, 79). Yet it is precisely in its need for the recu- peration of its moments of negation within a restorative discourse that the possi- bility of Dorn's late work, if not always the execution, is a central example of poetics as ideology critique...