Susan Friedman`s essay on the long poem invites us to rethink its uneasy position within the generic grid of genres in poetry and to reinterpret the epic tradition in modern poetics. Taking four strategies of ironist, historicist, re-visionist, or experimentalist, Friedman excavates modern female poets from H. D. to Loy, Ostriker, Grahn, and Warland and explains how they successfully feminize the masculine-codes of the epic genre. This paper, at once sharing her position to feminize the phallic code of the epic genre, goes against the grain of the critic methodology that proposes the woman`s long poems take the form of feminizing the epic genre. Rather, by revisiting Muriel Rukeyser`s The Book of the Dead in terms of female narrative and the politics of poetry, this essay argues that Rukeyser successfully reworks modern epic conventions and composes a national elegy and narrative of modern America. Reading The Book of the Dead as a woman`s American epic is to relocate Rukeyser who was erased in the literary history for a long time in the landscape of modern poetics. In the process of remapping the American epic tradition, this essay focuses on the relationships between gender and genres, between poetry and politics, between voices and truth. Beginning with the questions embedded in the nature of genres, unmixed and mixed, my reading probes Muriel Rukeyser`s quest to construct a woman`s American epic in the male-centered literary tradition and concludes that her serial poems in The Book of the Dead offer us the chance to re-envision a genre that questions the long-standing tenets about the long poem, literary tradition, and poetic authority.