Leslie Kaplan was born in Brooklyn, but raised and educated in France. Beginning in January 1968, Kaplan worked for two years in a series of factories. She later claimed that “no discourse could speak the factory,” but that some words—free of the forms and expectations of discourse— could undertake to do so. In L’excès-l’usine, she writes an alienating and often hidden place in society. The book-length poem, which includes nine “Circles,” acknowledges the distance and separation that the factory environment creates between people and objects.