Werner How I Became Hettie Jones by Hettie Jones and Iovis by Anne Waldman. At base, To Think of Her Writing Awash in Light is a collection of lyrical essays or long form reviews on four books: The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, edited by William Knight The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta L.

Yet the book overall-celebratory, scholarly, poetic-is as complex as the women’s writing it profiles. The essay on Jones in particular may bring to mind treatises on social conditions surrounding women’s creativity, like Tillie Olsen’s Silences or Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. To Think of Her Writing Awash in Light then is partly a quest to find poetry in the blank pages of women’s biographies. Died, too, in the shadow of a taller poet, her husband LeRoi Jones, who later erased his name, and her married name, to become Amiri Baraka. Russo writes, “her poems died aborning”-died, the implication is, for her work as an editor, typist, typesetter, and designer for the little magazine Yugen and for the poetry press Totem, died for her work as the mother of two young children. But the early poetry of Hettie Jones, specifically between the years 19, was rarely in the form of graphemes on paper. Today, Jones is the author of twenty-three books, three collections of poetry among them. Russo suggests that Jones’s early poetry is entirely uncollectable: “singing to the baby was made, clean dishes and a house and bills paid were made.” In Linda Russo’s essay on Hettie Jones, “Tired Machines and Non-Visible Women,” this apartment at 27 Cooper Square is monument to a different kind of poetry-a word, after all, rooted in deed, in making and doing. In a profile in New York Magazine, Jones explains how she showed the developers the history of the site-still her home-and thus saved it from destruction. In 2007, the railroad flat in Cooper Square in which Hettie Jones both made and became part of literary history was nearly demolished to make way for a hotel.