Muriel Rukeyser's pioneering politics and poetics, so clearly articulated even at inception of her career, have placed her at embattled center, and not maverick margins, of American intellectual and literary discourse. This essay resituates her modernist documentary poem within larger cultural vortex of 1930s to demonstrate profundity and continuing significance of her engagement - she who was so compelled by dance between poetry and science - with intellectual currents of her time. Rukeyser's unflinching grasp of immediate manifests itself in a diagnostic largeness of vision which in retrospect seems to verge nearly on prescient. Her poem The Book of Dead testifies to a canny preoccupation with precisely those questions that have come to define present contestation of objectivity, and with it whole terrain of postmodernity. For if 30s can be characterized by an objectivist sensibility - a collective infatuation with a whole spectrum of conflicting theories and practices, each claiming mantle of objectivity - then Rukeyser's Depression-era polemic reveals her both as that decade's orthodox product and as its dissenting, holistic prophet, not unlike re-membering goddess Isis she unfurls at poem's defiant end. The Book of Dead is a hybrid work - a 1938 Time review dismissed it as journalism, part lyricism, part Marxian mysticism (Rukeyser 2) - that erases boundaries between art and document, lyric and epic, pen and camera, naming and heroizing exploited and forgotten in an extended and self-reflexive act of witness. As a documentary text that cross-examines documentary conventions, it invites close comparison with James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; like John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, it utilizes modernist technique to compel attention to world beyond representation. Because it also exhibits many of earmarks of a long modernist poem including history, it arguably merits inclusion in same canon occupied by Ezra Pound's Jefferson and Adams cantos (to which it offers a striking counter-model), and William Carlos Williams's Paterson (which it anticipates by just a few years). Written while Great Depression deepened in United States and fascism raged across Europe, poem signals decisive moments both in American documentary expression and in late modernism, as new and remaining adherents of avant-garde aesthetics revived and revised modernist methods in order to convey complexities of escalating economic and political crisis. In this latter sense, Rukeyser's documentary collage poem can be placed alongside work of objectivist poets who adapted literary materialism of Pound and Williams to historical-materialist perspectives. To read The Book of Dead as a uniquely inflected instance of modernist objectivism is, of course, to stress affinities (especially with Charles Reznikoff's Testimony) over very real differences between them. But correspondences - Louis Zukofsky's manifesto-like formulation of poem as lens and Rukeyser's minute and probing enactment of it; a common emphasis on scienticity of poetry, on concreteness of its materials, and, ultimately, on status of signs as facts - have much to tell us about exigencies of postimagist poetics, as well as shared atmosphere of imperatives and restraints in which these poets wrote. Zukofsky's insistence in his 1931 objectivist program that writing should result from the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with things as they exist (273) is a deceptively realist rationale for urgent dismantling of existing representational models. For writers starting out in 30s, it was impossible to resist strong association between visual and factual (Daston and Galison 84) that ran rampant through culture at large. Rukeyser makes these central terms of The Book of Dead to enable acts of cognitive will and aesthetic resistance, taking full measure - by way of an allegorized account of Hawk's Nest disaster - of catastrophe that was modernity. …