The genius of Owens' work lies not in ideological commitments but in her access to the subconscious. One of our most courageous and insightful artists....and perhaps the most profound tragic playwright in the American theater.
... truly ahead of her time. In the early sixties Owens foreshadowed several literary movements that followed at least a decade later.
... she was doing some of the most adventurous work of the second half of the century.
One of the best known American playwrights in Britain on the strength of her play 'Futz' is Rochelle Owens. There is no question of her independence of imagination or its relevance to America.
Owens' dramatic imagination and verbal creativity mark her as a notable postmodern writer.
"Futz" is one of the most original and uninhibited pieces of dramatic literature ever written.
Owens' risk-taking is more radical in certain respects than Beckett or Shepard.
Chucky's Hunch is a funny wonderful play. Rochelle Owens' comic flame has never burnt so bright, but like the eye of the tiger, it is savage!
Rochelle Owens' monodrama about an untamed abstract painter and his perplexing relations with America in the shape of his ex-wife and mother is a triumph of sustained verbal fireworks! Not to be missed!
Rochelle Owens' inventiveness and imagination are always amazing, brilliant insight. The narrative poems in a language both subtle and devastating, another remarkable accomplishment—like the Grimm brothers turned inside out.
"Solitary Workwoman", a book-length poem is the latest deployment of Rochelle Owens' highly original intuitive intelligence. It is a potent postmodern mythic vision of Everywoman...Owens' language is luxurious, gem-incrusted, over the top, fearless in revelation of desire to be reborn, to search for utopia and to face up to finding apocalypse....Rochelle Owens writes poetry like nobody but nobody else.
For more than forty years Owens has been at the center of America's avant-garde...important for any large or modern literature collection.
"Chucky's Hunch." The character of Chucky reaches truly heroic proportions. A penetrating chain letter from the heart. A wonderful mixture of anger, madness, regret and self-incriminating introspection. Attention must be paid. A rare and daring dramatic imagination.
Like the one alert sentry before an enemy attack, Owens uses images to jolt her public awake and summon it to lifesaving responses to evil.
Rochelle Owens' writing is 'sui generis', brilliantly inventive, immensely learned, sophisticated and witty in its conceits. Hers is a universe of stark gesture, lightning flash, and uncompromising judgement, a poetic microstructure in its superb modulations of rhythms and internal rhymes, its ironies and paradoxes. An astonishing body of work.
There is a voice in Owens' work that seems to some of us—when first heard—like a fierce and unrelenting force of nature. She combines a landscape with a poetics, the domestic with the mythic, machines with the organic living world, sharp and visual—from which arises a construct and a fused vision: poetry and life.
"Beclch." Tantalizing! Owens has a rare and daring dramatic imagination. Hieronymus Bosch would feel at home and even the famous Kraft-Ebbing would! Raw and tough, belching fire and brimstone.
"Rochelle Owens' "Hermaphropoetics", a work in progress that continues the poetic & mythopoetic reach of her oeuvre as it has come to us since the 1960s. For me she remains, as she was when we first came to know her, a poet who bends the resources of language toward the revelation & creation of a new & always startling vision of the real & more-than-real."