An award-winning poet, M. Travis Lane has also been one of Canada's most productive literary critics over the past fifty years, having contributed several hundred reviews to Canadian publications. Heart on Fist includes a generous selection of her most essential pieces. A perceptive and fearless writer, Lane's trenchant critiques span a wide cross-section of English Canadian poetry and Quebecois works in translation. The volume brings together for the first time early considerations of Milton Acorn, Al Purdy and Michael Ondaatje, with close readings of Judith Fitzgerald, George Elliott Clarke, Ann Simpson and A.F. Moritz, as well as recontextualizations of avant garde writers like Margaret Christakos and Jay MillAr. One of the few women of her time to develop and maintain a critical voice in Canadian letters, this is a landmark book at a point when readers are increasingly looking for diversity in their literary journalism.