This book of poems commemorates the 50th anniversary of the death of Simone Weil. Classmate of Simone de Beauvoir, acquaintance of Trotsky, Spanish Civil War revolutionary, fighter in De Gaulle's French Resistance, Simone Weil (1909-1943) has also been called the greatest woman philosopher in the Western tradition. Early this century, three contemporaries in Paris - Weil, de Beauvoir and Gertrude Stein - reinvented the female intellect. Of the three, only Weil chose to base her thought on the trauma that war, rape, slavery and bias inflict. This title won the 1993 Brittingham Prize.

Contents:
- Absent from Dances, 1925
- Agent
- At Home
- Bench-Hand: "The Famous 'Real Life'"
- De Beauvoir, from Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
- Bloom as Blue Grapes
- Airdrill
- Counterweight
- Cosmic Progression, 1939-
- Consent
- Defilement
- Dignity
- Excused for Illness
- Fig Tree
- Gertrude Stein, Paris, 1925, from The Making...
- Gustave Thibon, How Simone Weil Appeared to Me / 1-5
- How Imperatives Enter the Body
- How You are Withheld from Me
- Intact
- Interview with André Weil, 1973
- Jews
- Justice
- Learning the Lyre
- Letters from Mme. Weil to Mlle. Chaintreuil, André's Tutor
- Love Affair, Fourth Century
- Mathematics: Galois
- My Not Burns
- Names / Ugliness
- Necessity
- Never But One
- Numberbody
- On the Wireless
- Past Centuries
- Quality
- Revelation
- Revolution: Simone at 27
- Soul Learns Everything from Body
- Still Darning a Sock
- There Comes
- Unconverted: Bede's Sparrow
- Unregarded Source
- Vertigo / Walk on Water
- War Rations Chosen, London, 1943
- Your Death: What Is Said
- Zealot in a Zoo
- Xeres: Take this Cup
- Xmas Pudding