SOURCE: A review of Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, in Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 1994, pp. 828-29.

In the following review, the critic praises Pollitt for asking new questions from a feminist perspective.

Most of the essays collected here (and previously published in The Nation, The New Yorker, and elsewhere) bring an important critical, often feminist, perspective to controversial issues: sex and sexuality, children and families, abortion and motherhood.

Debates about the literary canon, according to poet Pollitt (Antarctic Traveller, not reviewed), rest on the assumption that the only books that students will read are those lucky enough to make "the list." Maybe, she suggests, since there's so little reading going on at all, the list is really not so important. She imagines a country of "real readers" who read voluntarily, actively, and self-determinedly, exploring all kinds of literature in all kinds of settings; but she doesn't see...