SOURCE: McQuade, Molly. “A Pair of Poets Remember in Prose.” Chicago Tribune Books (23 April 1995): sec. 14, p. 6.

In the following excerpt, McQuade describes the lyrical quality of The Winged Seed, underscoring its significance with respect to autobiography.

We don't remember the past in an inverted pyramid style. Instead, memory is shaggy, grand, a mess. It tells us what to do, what to feel. We are at its beck.

So when an autobiography follows right angles too much, trying to corner or control the past, or when the memoirist is too much of a rationalist, memory suffers, losing its power and its life. Better that memory should take language in hand and insist that an autobiographer's story expand to fill the interstices of a new and less-standard form—a form invented as the writer works, at memory's behest.

That principle informs two new memoirs by poets—Melissa Green's Color Is...