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How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to ask myself when I was reading the poetry and prose of Denise Riley Immediately, I want to rewrite that sentence, and I have done many times while composing this difficult essay One of the problems of writing about Riley, a thinker so intensely committed to interrogating and destabilising the relationship between language and identity, is that you immediately feel yourself to be misrepresenting her if you try and say something plainly, if you try and deal in absolutes Born in Carlisle in 1948, Riley — currently AD White Professor-at-large at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY — has been a prolific poet, philosopher, essayist and teacher since the 1970s (her first collection MARXISM FOR INFANTS came out in 1977) But until recently it’s fair to say that, for the most part, her poetry had a small, committed following, and her theoretical and philosophical writing was recognised mostly within the academy Indeed, after her SELECTED POEMS came out with Reality Street in 2000, it seemed that Riley intended to stop publishing poetry altogether   Over the past eight years, however, things have changed In 2012, she published a new poem, ‘A Part Song’, in the London Review of Books, which went on to win the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem A collection, SAY SOMETHING BACK, was published by Picador, the literary imprint of publishing giant Pan Macmillan, in 2016, and was duly shortlisted for Best Collection, a prize that traditionally favours large publishing houses Correspondingly, her prominence in the broader literary establishment has increased: at the end of last year there was a petition circulating that decried her ageist exclusion from contesting the recent election for the prestigious Oxford Professor of Poetry position Recently, Picador has produced a new SELECTED POEMS and an updated edition of the essay TIME LIVED, WITHOUT ITS FLOW, which was first published by Edmund Hardy and James Wilkes’s Capsule Editions in 2012   It is strange to see Riley advertised in bookshop windows, gushed