SOURCE: Wilhelmus, Tom. “Ranches of Isolation.” Hudson Review 48, no. 1 (spring 1995): 145-52.

In the following excerpt, Wilhelmus evaluates Women, Animals, and Vegetables in terms of the relationship between isolation and the creative process.

[Maxine] Kumin's new book Women, Animals, and Vegetables: Essays and Stories creates a convincing portrait of a woman who seems to have gone Yeats one better, creating perfection of the work as well as the life, or at the very least has demonstrated how the two in rare instances may coincide. Having moved twenty years ago from suburban Boston to a New Hampshire farm, for reasons detailed in the essay “Long Road to an Upland Farm,” she has also demonstrated how isolation itself and an attentive reflection on the tasks of everyday life, are conducive to the creative process, an issue discussed in another essay entitled “Menial Labor and the Muse.”

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