On Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work

DuPlessis revels in the contradictory quality of this ‘both/and thinking,’ the kind of complex dialectic that keeps feminism, both in spite and because of current disidentifications with it, alive and at work. DuPlessis’ provocative readings of Lorine Neidecker and Barbara Guest thrive on the cusp of empathy and ambivalence…. The fact that ‘the I is cast as a character in this text’ allows DuPlessis to mingle the essay’s arousal with criticism’s scrutiny. ...Feminist reception ‘puts no limit on the nature of the work’ to be analyzed, nor should it ever, as these pieces subtly demonstrate, keep the critical play of identification and distance behind the scenes. 

Libbie Rifkin, “Working the Between: Sociopoesis and a Writing Life” [Review of Blue Studios]. Contemporary Literature 48.3 (Fall 2007): 468-473.

Blue Studios, then, is vital reading for anyone interested in feminist literary and cultural studies.

Ann Vickery. “Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work by Rachel Blau DuPlessis.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33, 2 (Winter 2008): 478-480.

DuPlessis maintains this mixture of registers throughout Blue Studios. Her style is personal, always self-reflexively grounded in her experience of reading and thinking. She does not shy away from playfulness in the form of puns and etymological games or from formal extravagances such as passages of lineated verse; and she offers both theoretical sophistication and a hard-nosed critical edge. She is, in short, doubly committed to complex formal analysis and ideological assessment. It's an all-too-rare combination to find in the writings of a literary scholar, and almost as rare to find in an essayist. 

Mark Scroggins. “Postmodernist Poetry’s ‘Blue Period.’” Twentieth Century Literature, October 2009

This giddy and densely satisfying mélange of scholarship and melos typifies DuPlessis's best work. Rich hybridity is especially evident in ‘f-words; An Essay on the Essay,’ where she both asserts and performs the inherently transgeneric and transgressive nature of the essay itself. Here DuPlessis's yoking of selves, aesthetic forms, and gendered identities cross-implicates her topics and their discourses. In this essay, more than in any other in the collection, her urgent language and condensed analyses propel us through her text, constantly reminding us of the indissoluble relationships among writing, representation, and thought. ‘f-words’ functions as a kind of ars poetica for much of the volume, certainly for the best of it.

Catherine Taylor. “Open Studios. Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work.” Postmodern Culture http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/18.1taylor.html