Margot Peters offers a readable and engaging account of Lorine Niedecker's life and writing in Lorine Niedecker: A Poet's Life. She draws on material that scholars of Niedecker will already know, such as the accounts published in Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet and her published letters to Cid Corman and Louis Zukofsky, but she also builds on material from Glenna Breslin's unfinished biography of the poet, John Lehman's America's Greatest Unknown Poet (2003), relevant archives, and numerous interviews with people who knew Niedecker. (Niedecker's letters are so lively and enlightening that one wishes them to be brought back into print, perhaps in a selected edition including letters not just to Corman and Zukofsky but to others as well, such as Gail Roub, Jonathan Williams, and Clayton Eshleman). While Peters is obviously dedicated to her subject and willing to side with Niedecker against Zukofsky and others who may not have treated the poet well, she offers a clear and balanced report of Niedecker's career and its context in twentieth-century American poetry.