SOURCE: Hall, Lynda. “A Phrase Petalled Deep.” Canadian Literature 159 (winter 1998): 186-88.

In the following review, Hall offers a positive evaluation of Readings from the Labyrinth.

In Readings from the Labyrinth, Daphne Marlatt offers her readers intensely personal reflections on more than two decades of her theoretical and fictional writings. The sensual charm of her voice and language reverberates throughout the text, seductively embracing the reader and encouraging connections. Approaching the project autobiographically, Marlatt collects together many familiar theoretical essays (some of which are significantly revised), and new essays. These are interspersed with photographs, conference programs, journal entries, and letter excerpts. Marlatt explains these writings are “Attempts to read my life and the lives of women close to me in light of theoretical readings about our psychosocial conditioning as women, as lesbians, writing.” In a postmodern gesture, the book starts and ends with a duplicate page of twenty small...