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Praise for To Think of Her Writing Awash in Light

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Analysis, as this book’s epigraph from Gertrude Stein suggests, is how women discover “there are laws.” In these inventive, genre-bending literary and lyrical essays on five women writers — Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger and Anne Waldman — Linda Russo investigates the essayist-poet’s relationship to her subjects and their social and material geographies (in landscapes, archives, and domestic spaces, from Grasmere, England, to Harvard’s Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusettes, to Bolinas, California). As a result To Think of her Writing Awash in Light illuminates a history of women’s shifting relationship to the unwritten “laws” of literary production over two centuries.

The often thought to be ephemeral parts of a gendered writing life are made major in Linda Russo’s To Think of her Writing Awash in Light. She spends time with the edits of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals, with Emily Dickinson’s desk and her envelopes, with Hettie Jones’s typing of Yugen as editing, with reading out loud as she writes of reading from Anne Waldman’s epic Iovis with Joanne Kyger. In the tradition of Susan Howe and Lisa Robertson, it’s a book that might be essay and might be literary criticism and might just be a love poem too. It surprises and delights with its serious beauty.

~ JULIANA SPAHR

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