A critical study of the poetry of maverick Israeli poet Yona Wallach (1944-1985). Known for its "unique combination of elements of rock and roll, Jungian psychology and street slang, break-neck pace and insistent sexuality," as one critic described it, Yona Wallach's work epitomizes the literary climate of her time. Influenced by the poetic revolution in Israel during the 1950s, this body of poetry reflects the cultural crises that rocked the academic world in the 1960s and the intellectual battles many artists fought with the "prison-house" of semiotic systems in which the human mind, they felt, was entrapped. Zafrira Lidovsky Cohen describes Wallach's unconventional bohemian lifestyle, traces her poetic corpus, and surveys her critical reputation. Then, drawing on her own rich and varied background in Bible, mythology, Hebrew language, and poststructuralist and postmodemist literary and linguistic theory, Cohen translates and interprets representative examples of Wallach's oeuvre and situates them within a variety of historical and literary contexts.