The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history
"The fabled violence of American patrimony is here tracked and qualified by brilliantly perceptive readings of initial texts of that common inheritance. Susan Howe, herself "a library-cormorant" in Coleridge's phrase, brings to her task the powers of a major poet and the adamant measure of the "Other" she, as all women, have been forced to be. This remarkable book is vivid testimony of that voice we can no longer silence." -- Robert Creeley