Hicok is highly successful in bringing together for the first time the threads of a discussion that has informed scholarly, biographical, and creative work on Bishop for decades: the importance of Brazil to the poet?s work. Hicok?s welcome contribution is to synthesize, integrate, and more fully develop that discussion than has been attempted to date.
Neil Besner, University of Winnipeg, translator of Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares
Hicok animates the rich complexity of Bishop?s years in Brazil, living among the cultural elite during a period of tumultuous political change and, later, personal urgency, evincing the ways in which Brazilian literature and politics informed Bishop?s poetry. It is a book that enables Bishop scholars and readers alike to see, vividly, Brazil?s place in Bishop?s imaginary.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil represents a significant development in Bishop studies. It is a dliigently researched work that adds much to the analysis of Bishop's Brazilian poems and translations.... The book greatly extends our knowledge of Bishop's time in Brazil, and the reverberations this had on her work, whilst also proving a useful resource for scholars who are interested in the wealth of Brazilian criticism on Bishop.
Journal of American Studies
Bethany Hicok?s exceptionally readable book puts the "intercultural import-export" business of Elizabeth Bishop?s Brazil into newly legible shape. Drawing on prose drafts still in the archives as well as on the recently published verse and prose, and following the lead of critics such as George Monteiro, Elizabeth Neely, and Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins, Hicok makes some sharp new discoveries.
American Literary History
Bethany Hicok?s Elizabeth Bishop?s Brazil... enhance[s] our understanding of the cultural circumstances and technical theater behind Bishop?s air of inevitability?the uncanny sense, which Bishop readers often have, that her finished poem could not have been written any other way without diminishing its power.... [I]n ground-breaking analyses of significant aspects of Bishop?s art, [ Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century] invite[s] us to extend, yet again, our understanding and our nomenclature.
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature