While some reviewers or readers may value Palmer's work as an "extension of modernism", they criticize and even reject Palmer's work as discordant: an "interruption of our composure" (to invoke Robert Duncan's phrase). Palmer's own stated poetics will not allow or settle for "vanguard gesturalism". In a singular confrontion with the modernist project, the poet must suffer 'loss', embrace disturbance and paradox, and agonize over what cannot be accounted for. It is a poetry that can, at once, gesture toward post-modern, post-avant-garde, semiotic concerns even as it acknowledges that