Hathcock, Nelson, Critical Survey of Poetry , Magill, 1991, pp. 954-61.

McDowell, Robert, "The Assembling Visions of Rita Dove," in Callaloo, Vol. 9, No. 1, Winter 1986, pp. 52-60.

Steffen, Therese, Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove's Poetry, Fiction and Drama, Oxford University Press, 2001.

Vendler, Helen, "A Dissonant Triad," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1991, pp. 391-404. —, The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition, Harvard University Press, 1995.