“These essays have already had a profound influence on the course of North American poetry. Howe’s scholarship is exhilarating and endlessly provocative. Her poetic revisioning of the essay form is exemplary. Howe’s convincing reading of Dickinson’s manuscripts as the primary site of her “sumptuary” values is a major challenge to previous readings of Dickinson and inaugurates a new era in Dickinson scholarship. In The Birth-mark, Howe insists not on the return of the author but the resurgence of writing and of the poetic as the wildness at the heart of an ever-emerging America.”

“The Birth-mark . . . is an astonishing work re-presenting the American past, its history, literature, texts, and critics. At once gnomic and lucid, grave and scintillating, it is a trespass comparable to Lawrence’s or Olson’s in its passionate grasp of materials, its critical delegitimation of iconic cultural authorities, its fierce originality . . . Howe is a witness of the almost unrepresentable borderlands of history, spiritual striving, and human grief; her writing has a unique sublimity.”

"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

"No other poet now writing has Howe's power to bring together narrative and lyric, textual scholarship and historical speculation, found text and pure invention."—Marjorie Perloff

"These essays have already had a profound influence on the course of North American poetry. Howe's scholarship is exhilarating and endlessly provocative. Her poetic revisioning of the essay form is exemplary. Howe's convincing reading of Dickinson's manuscripts as the primary site of her sumptuary values is a major challenge to previous readings of Dickinson and inaugurates a new era in Dickinson scholarship. In The Birth-mark, Howe insists not on the return of the author but the resurgence of writing and of the poetic as the wildness at the heart of an ever-emerging America."—Charles Bernstein

"The Birth-mark . . . is an astonishing work re-presenting the American past, its history, literature, texts, and critics. At once gnomic and lucid, grave and scintillating, it is a trespass comparable to Lawrence's or Olson's in its passionate grasp of materials, its critical delegitimation of iconic cultural authorities, its fierce originality . . . Howe is a witness of the almost unrepresentable borderlands of history, spiritual striving, and human grief; her writing has a unique sublimity."—Rachel Blau DuPlessis

"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."

“No other poet now writing has Howe’s power to bring together narrative and lyric, textual scholarship and historical speculation, found text and pure invention.”