SOURCE: Turchi, Peter. “About Heather McHugh: A Profile.” Ploughshares 27, no. 1 (spring 2001): 210-16.

In the following essay, Turchi provides a biographical profile of McHugh and a critical analysis of her poetry.

Heather McHugh is wired. She is also wireless (see laptop, below), wry, and webbed (spondee.com). She speaks in passionate flurries, seriocomic riffs that only begin to reflect her speed of thought. She annotates as she speaks, offering first and second answers, embellishing and revising and punning. Words are her sparks and her flame.

“As the world's shyest child,” she has written, “I was the one who never spoke in school but who registered, with uncalled-for intensity, every twist of tone and talk; who, at home, went directly to her room to write, because writing proposed a fellow listener, though things seemed quite unspeakable.”

Listening to McHugh, one has the sense that she must constantly slow herself down...