During the time I begin reading the biographies of the mad wives, stewing in my obsessions, feeling eerily like I was performing their lives, I write a letter to Poetry magazine about a review of Djuna Barnes’s posthumous poetry collection. Although I had previously written theater and book reviews, I think of this letter as one of my first acts of “criticism,” which for me always originates in feeling, in an angry protectiveness, especially towards my beloved women.
