RaveThe Star TribuneNow comes Hilary Holladay’s taut, engaging The Power of Adrienne Rich, which plumbs the career of one of our more complex writers and activists, who, early on, tracked along the same trajectory as Plath and Sexton, but then rocketed into an orbit that blended poetics with politics in dazzling, uncompromising fashion ... The poet’s swerve toward enjambment and erasure of punctuation were political acts; and as politics became Rich’s lodestar, so did her compulsive need to discover herself: \'It was always the Jew in her, even before the woman, the lesbian … who yearned and needed to be heard and seen. … She had made a Talmud of her life, the multiple meanings of which demanded endless study, debate, and interpretation.\' The Power of Adrienne Rich announces its thesis in its title, but Holladay is a fair-minded and meticulous critic of the poet’s life and art. This elegant, assured biography underscores Rich’s essential place in our literary pantheon.
Katherine May
RaveThe Star TribuneIn her restrained yet exuberant memoir, Wintering, British writer Katherine May counters Smith as surely as one solstice tilts against the other, evoking an atavistic grace tied to home and hearth, a season of inventory. For May, hunkering down is just another way to roll up her sleeves and get to work ... the memoir unfolds as a series of monthly essays ... May\'s prose has a Rachel Cusk feel — poised, cool, restrained — and yet we sense the narrator jumping out of her skin, a subtle tension that propels us through a story laced with brutal self-honesty.
