Without Asking marks Jane Ransom's debut as a book author, initially placing her within the poetic tradition of narrative Confessionalism. But one can already sense here the ambivalence that would lead both to a break from narrative--in her second poetry book, Scene of the
Crime--and her subsequent return to narrative in Bye-Bye, her first novel. This is a writer whose epistemological inquiry continuously turns both inward and outward, from...