Unlocking the Secrets of the Lyric Essay: Heidi Czerwiec’s Guide to Striking a Powerful Chord
Reviewed by Melissa Oliviera
When the lyric essay first showed up on my radar several years ago, my early reading involved The Next American Essay series as well as a handful of wonderful magazines including this one, Brevity, The Seneca Review, River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things,” and others.
Generally, before anthologies like Randon Billings Noble’s excellent A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays came on the scene, I just sought out practitioners whose work I enjoyed and learned by following their work and finding, in the other places they wrote, more people to read. My all-you-can-read lyric essay buffet was satisfying but full of digressions and, to be honest, I didn’t feel like I really understood it as a genre. Over time, the bin in my brain marked “lyric essay” expanded ever further. I couldn’t really pin down what a lyric essay was, though I knew I loved it. Still, when it came to talking about the lyric essay, I didn’t quite have the right vocabulary.
