«The grotesque style brings together (without resolution) the categories that our minds and our culture like to keep apart but that constantly converge in nature and experience. Gender is by no means the unique example in which Bishop finds experience and nature resisting convention, but it becomes, in many poems, the angle of vision by which she reveals our ambivalence about the body. Her effort is to connect deviance and organicism, hence to reimagine what is «natural.» Bishop herself expresses mixed feelings of attraction and revulsion toward the organic world’s resistance to icons, form, and cultural convention and to her own emotional deviance and iconoclasm.»
Bonnie Costello, «Attractive Mortality», en Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, M. M. Lombardi (ed.), University Press of Virginia, 1993, p. 127.
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