"The Dialects of the Tribe" provides an overview of the various schools of poetry that developed during the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. It provides insights into the methods, concerns, and poems of many of the prominent poets of the period, and a critical assessment of the development of contemporary poetic movements including the most recent, Neoformalism, which brought a return of prosodic concerns from the hinterlands of anti-intellectualism to which formal poetry had been exiled during the 'fifties and 'sixties, though the egocentric 'seventies and into the greedy 'eighties.