The Woman in the Red Dress: Gender,Space, and Reading. Minrose C. Gwin. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002.

An eclectic montage of literary analysis, autobiography, and reader response, taking the form of personal anecdotes and autonomous essays, The Woman in the Red Dress takes the reader on a journey in which Minrose C. Gwin analyzes both metaphoric and physical personal space. As Gwin defines it, space is "not an entity that contains something else but [is] the swirl of social relations and productions in particular locations, whether these locations be material, cultural, or even psychological" (6). The purpose of Gwin's work, as she says, perhaps too repetitively is: "to dramatize textual encounters in which narrative, space, and gender inscribe themselves on one another and their readers" (38). The title of this volume refers to the first work Gwin discusses in her introduction: Native American poet Joy Harjo's poem, "Deer Dancer," about a woman in a stained red dress who dances naked on a bar, changing not just the lives of those present, but also those who, like the narrator, merely hear the story (6-7).     

Women Poets on the Left: Lola Ridge,Genevieve Taggard,Margaret Walker. Nancy Berke. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2001.

Nancy Berke offers a cogent and convincing argument to include radical women poets within the canonical texts of modernist poetry. Unlike the broad overview texts commonly used in academic settings, Berke's Women Poets on the Left places Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, and Margaret Walker within the context of the political and social histories that shaped their lives and consciousness. This work complicates poetic analyses, challenges white male dominance in the field, and provides a critical feminist take on poetry produced by women on the left during the twenties and thirties. Moreover, Berke's inclusion of Margaret Walker, whose work falls between two critical periods, the 1940s and 1960s, contextualizes how the poetry of activist women provides multivalent perspectives and demonstrates a continuum of radical modernist poetry in the United States.