Unlocking the Secrets of the Lyric Essay: Heidi Czerwiec’s Guide to Striking a Powerful Chord

Unlocking the Secrets of the Lyric Essay: Heidi Czerwiec's Guide to Striking a Powerful Chord

Reviewed by Melissa Oliviera

cover of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord by Heidi CzerwiecWhen 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.

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