SOURCE: A review of The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, Vol. 8, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 59–61.

In the following review, Nelson offers a positive assessment of The Birth-mark, praising it as a “poetically rendered critical effort.”

Susan Howe is a well-published poet and occasional critic. Here in her Birth-mark, she forays into textual research, bringing to that project lyrical speculativeness and feminist awareness. This study of American colonial and U.S. literature, an inquiry into marginalia, antinomianism, editorial control, and the poetics of written form is as unsettling of present disciplinary boundaries as the texts she takes up to study.

Howe discerns a pattern in the editorial (read: cultural and textual) management of women's voices from Anne Hutchinson to Emily Dickinson. As she argues,

the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson represent a contradiction to canonical social power...