From her home in Blackhawk Island WI, the poet Lorine Niedecker traded lively and impactful letters with numerous peers, most notably Louis Zukofsky and, later, Cid Corman. After a brief sojourn in New York, she lived alone in a one-room cabin for much of her adult life, walking several miles to nearby Fort Atkinson to work as a copy editor at a dairy industry newsletter until failing eyesight reduced her to menial labour. Niedecker connected to the outside world by post, and among the small shelf of books she kept for herself were several collections of letters, including those of the composer Franz Liszt and his lover, the scholar Marie Catherine Sophie, Comtesse d'Agoult. “Letter from Blackhawk Island” assembles images and sound gathered on the small plot of land by the Rock River where Niedecker lived, along with ambient audio from the only existing recording of the poet's voice, into the filmmaker's own condensed missive of prismatic correspondences.