The work of Maggie O'Sullivan (b.1951) eludes the usual categories of criticism, listening and reading. Peter Manson begins a review of In the House of the Shaman (1993) by noting that ‘There are books whose interest can be gauged by the difficulty a reviewer has in finding anything remotely useful to say about them’ (Manson, 1994, 65). Andrew Duncan writes that ‘I remember how scared I was of Maggie O'Sullivan's poetry when I first saw it […] I didn't have the energy to form the motions it was calling’ (Duncan, 2003, 266). Finally, Charles Bernstein's description of listening to a forty-second recording of O'Sullivan reading ‘To Our Own Day’ reports how

Three male critics teeter on the edge of the sayable in the face of experimental writing by a woman. It is notable that, until the publication of The Salt Companion to Maggie O'Sullivan (2011), which included six women out of fourteen contributors, the UK reception of her work had been largely framed by men. Both In the House of the Shaman (1993) and Body of Work (2006) have blurbs or forewords by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Peter Manson and Robert Sheppard. However, gender (as it is usually understood in cultural and literary criticism) is largely absent from O'Sullivan's work.

Duncan's and Bernstein's emphasis on looking and listening and on an apparently fixed text's ability to call forth mobile and multiple meanings underlines both the importance of gesture and performance in O'Sullivan's works and the way that her works exist both on and off the page. Duncan and Bernstein also speak to the effects of a textual and/or sonic body on the body of the reader or listener. Isobel Armstrong's account of O'Sullivan's reading/performance of murmur: tasks of mourning at Birkbeck College, University of London, 2003, notes that her work uses ‘oral looking and visual hearing’, so that