22 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

Pat Righelato, Understanding Rita Dove (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 2006).
A thorough and useful examination of Dove’s poetry from the first book to
American Smooth.

John Shoptaw, “Segregated Lives: Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah,” in Reading
Black, Reading Feminist, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Pen-
guin, 1990), pp. 374–381.
Attributes the difficulties of integrating the volume’s two sections of poems
(“Mandolin” and “Canary in Bloom”) to issues related to the historical separation
of genders.

Therese Steffen, Crossing Color: Transcultural Space and Place in Rita Dove’s Poetry,
Fiction, and Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
The first full-length critical reaction to Dove’s work. Steffen explores Dove’s
writing up to the new century with an emphasis on its internationality and U.S.-
European reach.

—Billy Clem, Linda Trinh Moser, and Kathryn West

h

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

(New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984;

revised, New York: Holt, 1993).

In a series of interrelated novels and short stories Louise Erdrich has detailed
the lives and histories of families on and around an Ojibwe reservation in North
Dakota over the course of the twentieth century. She dramatizes her characters’
loves, losses, foibles, feats, and tragedies with a mixture of humor that ranges from
the subtle to the outrageous, with a clear-eyed sympathy that refuses sentimental-
ity, with an interwoven mixture of the marvelous and the mundane, and with a
deep awareness of history. Even in her works that are not part of the reservation
series, characters familiar from the reservation make an appearance. Erdrich’s
reservation series began with Love Medicine, winner of the National Book Critics
Circle Award (as well as a host of other awards) and the first novel by a Native
American to become a best seller.
Karen Louise Erdrich was born on 7 June 1954 to an Ojibwe and French
mother and a German American father. She grew up primarily in Wahpeton,
North Dakota, near the Turtle Mountain Reservation, where she is an enrolled
member of the Pembina band. Both of her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian
Affairs school on the reservation. Her maternal grandfather, Patrick Gourneau,
was tribal chair of the Turtle Mountain Reservation and one of several sources
of fine storytelling during her childhood. Her family encouraged her at a young
age to tell stories, with her father offering her a nickel per story and her mother
helping her to make book covers.