Books by Adrienne Rich
The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004
"Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right."--Booklist, starred review In this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem, in a young schoolteacher's voice, evokes the lessons that children ("Not of course here") learn amid violence and hatred, "when the whole town flinches / blood on the undersole thickening to glass." "Usonian Journals 2000" intercuts faces and conversations, building to a dystopic/utopic vision. Throughout these fierce and musical poems, Rich traces the imprint of a public crisis on individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account.
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The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004
A new work by a distinguished poet. In this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem, in a young schoolteacher's voice, evokes the lessons that children ("Not of course here") learn amid violence and hatred, "when the whole town flinches / blood on the undersole thickening to glass." "Usonian Journals 2000" intercuts faces and conversations, building to a dystopic/utopic vision. Throughout these fierce and musical poems, Rich traces the imprint of a public crisis on individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account.
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Adrienne Rich (Voice of the Poet)
by Adrienne Rich, J. D. McClatchy
THE VOICE OF THE POET
A remarkable series of audiobooks, featuring distinguished twentieth-century American poets reading from their own work. A first in audiobook publishing--a series that uses the written word to enhance the listening experience--poetry to be read as well as heard. Each audiobook includes rare archival recordings and a book with the text of the poetry, a bibliograohy, and commentary by J. D. McClatchy, the poet and critic, who is the editor of The Yale Review.
"Hearing poetry spoken by the poet is always a unique illumination. This series opens our ears to some of the most passionate utterances and enthralling performances ever recorded."--Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize winner, Poetry
"There has been a great need for a well-edited audio series for poetry, with high literary and technical quality. J. D. McClatchy has filled this need with great style."--Robert Pinsky
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Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006
A new volume from Adrienne Rich, recipient of the National Book Foundation's 2006 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth is one of Adrienne Rich's most unpredictable and evocative collections. In the folk/blues tradition behind "Rhyme," in the incantatory pattern of "Behind the Motel," in the voices from past and present in "Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send," in the dystopic scenes and intimate encounters of "Draft # 2006," in the mysterious negotiations of the title poem, the tempos and moods of this book constantly vary. Here, Rich draws on the artistic means of a lifetime.
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A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008
“Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters.”―Nadine Gordimer Across more than three decades Adrienne Rich’s essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators’ worlds.
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A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008
One of America’s most distinguished poets explores the complex relationship between art and social justice. Over more than three decades Adrienne Rich’s essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators’ worlds.This powerful new collection includes a stirring response to the anthology Iraqi Poetry Today, a critique of three classic socialist manifestos, and a rereading of The Dead Lecturer, an early volume of poems by LeRoi Jones. Rich engages the impulse to make art that both impels toward and interacts with social change, a theme she also traces through the letters of poets Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, gay and lesbian politics and poetry, and influential texts on Zionism and the Jewish diaspora.
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Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010
Relationships―partings/reconciliations, solidarities/ruptures, trust/betrayal, exposure/withdrawal―are the deep fabric of this forceful work. In the intimate address of "Axel Avákar," the black humor of "Quarto," and the underground journey of "Powers of Recuperation," compressed lyrics flash among larger scenarios where images, dialogues, blues, and song spiral into political visions. Adrienne Rich has said, "I believe almost everything I know, have come to understand, is somewhere in this book."
from "Ballade of the Poverties"
There's the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you
Can't get to the poverty of bodies lying unburied
There's the poverty of labor offered silently on the curb
The poverty of yard sale scrapings spread
And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street
Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words
There are poverties and there are poverties.
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An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In this, her thirteenth book of verse, the author of "The Dream of a Common Language" and "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" writes of war, oppression, the future, death, mystery, love and the magic of poetry.
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Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972
In her seventh volume of poetry, Adrienne Rich searches to reclaim―to discover―what has been forgotten, lost, or unexplored. "I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail." These provocative poems move with the power of Rich's distinctive voice.
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The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977
“Certain lines had become like incantations to me, words I’d chanted to myself through sorrow and confusion” ―Cheryl Strayed, Wild “The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman’s heart and mind in language for everybody―language whose plainness, laughter, questions and nobility everyone can respond to. . . . No one is writing better or more needed verse than this.”―Boston Evening Globe
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$15.95
A Change of World: Poems
This reissue of Adrienne Rich’s first poetry collection reaffirms the author’s place as one of our most important American poets. A Change of World was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Out of print for decades, this initial collection launched the career of a poet whose work has been crucial to discussions of gender, race, and class, pushing formal boundaries and consistently examining both self and society.
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Collected Poems: 1950–2012
The collected works of Adrienne Rich, whose poetry is "distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity" (New York Times). A Finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation and one of our most important American poets. She brought discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse, pushing formal boundaries and consistently examining both self and society.
This collected volume traces the evolution of her poetry, from her earliest work, which was formally exact and decorous, to her later work, which became increasingly radical in both its free-verse form and feminist and political content. The entire body of her poetry is on display in this vast volume, including the National Book Award–winning Diving Into the Wreck and her prize-winning Atlas of the Difficult World.
The Collected Poems of Adrienne Rich gathers and memorializes all of her boldly political, formally ambitious, thoughtful, and lucid work, the whole of which makes her one of the most prolific and influential poets of our time.
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What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
America's enduring poet of conscience reflects on the proven and potential role of poetry in contemporary politics and life. Through journals, letters, dreams, and close readings of the work of many poets, Adrienne Rich reflects on how poetry and politics enter and impinge on American life. This expanded edition includes a new preface by the author as well as her post-9/11 "Six Meditations in Place of a Lecture."
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Poetry and Commitment
In the traditional of great literary manifestos, Norton is proud to present this powerful work by Adrienne Rich. With passion, critical questioning, and humor, Adrienne Rich suggests how poetry has actually been lived in the world, past and present. In this essay, which was the basis for her speech upon accepting the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she ranges among themes including poetry's disparagement as "either immoral or unprofitable," the politics of translation, how poetry enters into extreme situations, different poetries as conversations across place and time. In its openness to many voices, Poetry and Commitment offers a perspective on poetry in an ever more divided and violent world.
"I hope never to idealize poetry―it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard."
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Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Adrienne Rich's influential and landmark investigation concerns both the experience and the institution of motherhood. The experience is her own―as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother―but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.
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The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950-2001
A reissue of the classic Adrienne Rich selection, revised and expanded to cover the entirety of her career, with a new Introduction. The Fact of a Doorframe is the ideal introduction to Rich's opus, from her formative lyricism in A Change of Word (1951), to the groundbreaking poems of Diving into the Wreck (1973), to the searching voice of Fox (2001).
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Selected Poems: 1950-2012
Sixty years of poems from pioneering writer, activist, and intellectual Adrienne Rich―“the Blake of American letters” (Nadine Gordimer).
Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation, bringing discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse. This generous selection from all nineteen of Rich’s published poetry volumes encompasses her best-known work―the clear-sighted and passionate feminist poems of the 1970s, including “Diving into the Wreck,” “Planetarium,” and “The Phenomenology of Anger”―and offers the full range of her evolution as a poet. From poems leading up to her feminist breakthrough through bold later work such as “North American Time” and “Calle Visión,” Selected Poems celebrates Rich’s prophetic vision as well as the inventiveness that shaped her enduring art.
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Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry
A New York Times Critics’ Pick
A career-spanning selection of the lucid, courageous, and boldly political prose of National Book Award winner Adrienne Rich.
Demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision, Essential Essays showcases Adrienne Rich’s singular ability to unite the political, personal, and poetical. The essays selected here by feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert range from the 1960s to 2006, emphasizing Rich’s lifelong intellectual engagement and fearless prose exploration of feminism, social justice, poetry, race, homosexuality, and identity.
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Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry
A career-spanning selection of the lucid, courageous, and boldly political prose of National Book Award winner Adrienne Rich.
Adrienne Rich was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major intellectual voice of her generation. Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of her most renowned essays into one volume, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice, her prophetic vision, and her revolutionary views on social justice. Rich’s essays unite the political, personal, and poetical like no other.
Essential Essays is edited and includes an introduction by leading feminist scholar, literary critic, and poet Sandra M. Gilbert. Emphasizing Rich’s lifelong intellectual engagement, the essays selected here range from the 1960s to 2008. The volume contains one of Rich’s earliest essays,“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” which discusses the need for female self-definition, along with excerpts from her ambitious, ground-breaking Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. As the New York Times wrote, Rich “brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse,” as evidenced in her 1980 essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”
Also among these insightful and forward-thinking works are: “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity”; excerpts from What Is Found There, about the need to reexamine the literary canon; “Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts”; “Poetry and the Forgotten Future”; and other writings that profoundly shaped second-wave feminism, each balanced by Rich’s signature blend of research, theory, and self-reflection.
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Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010
“Rich’s poetry itself is a mirror, reflecting the truths about humanity this discerning poet has come to understand.”―Booklist “Rich is one of the greatest American poets of the past half century . . . attested to both by the extraordinary power of her poems and by the laurels she’s racked up. . . . The events of our blood-dimmed decade have afforded Rich a subject for some of her strongest material.”―Sara Marcus, San Francisco Chronicle
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Later Poems: Selected and New: 1971–2012
The final volume of poems by America’s most powerful and distinctive poetic voice. Later Poems: Selected and New brings together a remarkable body of work by the celebrated poet. Included are Adrienne Rich’s own selections from twelve volumes of published works, including the National Book Award–winning Diving into the Wreck, An Atlas of the Difficult World, and her final volume, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, along with ten powerful new poems, previously uncollected. This collection testifies to a monumental career that distinguished American literature in the late twentieth century, and will continue to inspire readers for years to come.
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Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988
Time's Power is a new book by a major American poet, and a landmark in a distinguished ongoing career. For thirty years, Rich's poetry has revealed the individual personal life―sexualities, loves, damages, struggles―as inseparable from a wider social condition, a world with others, in which the empowering of the disempowered is increasingly the source of human hope. Now her mature vision engages with the power of time itself: memory and its contradictions, the ebb and flow between parents and children, the deaths we all face sooner or later, the meaning of human responsibility in all this.
"Letters in the Family," for example, is written in the voices of three women―from the Spanish Civil War, from a Jewish rescue mission behind Nazi lines, and from present-day Southern Africa. Time's Power shows Rich writing with unprecedented range, complexity, and authority.
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Fox Poems 1998-2000
"A challenging collection that should more than satisfy [Rich's] large and loyal following."—Washington Post Book World
In this volume, Adrienne Rich pursues her signature themes and takes them further: the discourse between poetry and history, interlocutions within and across gender, dialogues between poets and visual artists, human damages and dignity, and the persistence of utopian visions. Here Rich continues taking the temperature of mind and body in her time in an intimate and yet commanding voice that resonates long after an initial reading. Fox is formidable and moving, fierce and passionate, and one of Rich's most powerful works to date. "Justly celebrated....Rich has long wanted to set her readers' minds blazing...she succeeds."—Publishers Weekly starred review "Intimate, explorative, these are poems with a millennial feel, at once retrospective and forward-looking."—Washington Post Book WorldCopies
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On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978
In this collection of prose writings, one of America's foremost poets and feminist theorists reflects upon themes that have shaped her life and work. At issue are the politics of language; the uses of scholarship; and the topics of racism, history, and motherhood among others called forth by Rich as "part of the effort to define a female consciousness which is political, aesthetic, and erotic, and which refuses to be included or contained in the culture of passivity."
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Dark Fields of the Republic Poems, 1991-1995
"When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?" asks Adrienne Rich in Dark Fields of the Republic, her major new work. Her explorations go to the heart of democracy and love, and the historical and present endangerment of both. The poems of Dark Fields of the Republic are a theater of voices: of men and women, the dead and the living, over time and across continents. Rich writes out of dreams and nightmares, conversations actual and imaginary, actions taken for better or for worse, out of histories and songs, humdrum and terrible events, the most intimate loves and love for the world.
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