Unlocking the Secrets of the Lyric Essay: Heidi Czerwiec’s Guide to Striking a Powerful Chord
Crafting the Lyric Essay offers a smart, simple way of thinking about the lyric essay: if you want to understand what a lyric essay is, look to the lyre. Or as Czerwiec, a poet by training, puts it herself, “the lyric essay depends on the lyre, on lyric mode — a focus on patterning, and on resonances of sound and silence and image on the level of the language.” In other words, we can look to poetry and poetics to help us talk about lyric essays. Czerwiec’s book, itself born of conversations, is itself a kind of conversation, with dialogue built into the structure of it. Chapters move back and forth between more traditional craft essays about some topic and hybrid essays showing those craft topics at work.
