"Pulitzer Prize-winner and former poet laureate of the United States Rita Dove has written prolifically since the early 1970s. In this, the first full-length critical study of her entire body of work by an American scholar, Malin Pereira traces the development of Dove's literary voice, looking at the ways she combines racial specificity with the perspective of the unraced universal. Pereira examines Dove's poetry, fiction, drama, and literary criticism closely and chronologically, charting her path through the racially charged culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on a wide range of Dove's work, Pereira demonstrates how she eventually transcended racial protocols that threatened to define her work and has moved into a nomadic poetic articulation of her cosmopolitan identity."--Jacket.