Robb St. Lawrence, “‘Taking the Cards You’re Dealt and Building a House’: An
Interview with Rita Dove,” Bellingham Review, 29 (Fall 2006): 77–84; also
available at http://people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b/Bellingham%20Review.pdf
[accessed 24 November 2009].
Fascinating discussion of Dove’s interests in form and arrangement, and reflect-
ing the interplay of cultures in poetry, including her representations of guns, war,
and dancing.
Helen Vendler, “An Interview with Rita Dove,” in Reading Black, Reading Feminist,
edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 481–491.
Discusses craft and aesthetics for her work up to the late 1980s.
Criticism
Elizabeth Alexander, “The Yellow House on the Corner and Beyond: Rita Dove
on the Edge of Domesticity,” in Power and Possibility: Essays, Reviews, and
Interviews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
Excellent overview of Dove’s first three collections that analyzes how Dove’s
“girlhood persona” challenges the confines of domesticity.
Rita Dove http://people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b [accessed 24 November 2009].
Dove’s faculty homepage at the University of Virginia. It provides a comprehen-
sive look at her career, complete with links to selected criticism, audios of the
poet’s readings, and videos of her ballroom dancing.
“Rita Dove: American Poet,” special issue of Callaloo, 31 (Summer 2008).
Includes several poems and prose pieces by Dove, a two-part interview by Charles
Henry Rowell, critical essays, a selected bibliography, and current and childhood
photographs of Dove with her family and friends.
Lotta Lofgren, “Partial Horror: Fragmentation and Healing in Rita Dove’s
Mother Love,” Callaloo, 19 (Winter 1996): 135–142.
Explores Mother Love through an examination of relationships between mothers
and daughters and between women.
Robert McDowell, “The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove,” in Conversant Essays:
Contemporary Poets on Poetry, edited by James McCorkle (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1990), pp. 294–302.
Discusses intersections between the personal and public in three of Dove’s collec-
tions—The Yellow House, Museum, and Thomas and Beulah—with attention to the
relationship between her poems and myths.
Malin Pereira, Rita Dove’s Cosmopolitanism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2003).
Argues that Dove transcends “racial specificity” in an attempt to touch upon
universal themes; includes chapters devoted to each of Dove’s major collec-
tions through Mother Love and an interview conducted by Pereira. This work
is especially useful for its summaries of the critical appraisal of each of Dove’s
works.