Essays discuss history, the imagination, ethics, racism, anti-semitism, women's studies, feminist criticism, and politics

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985

Literature & Fiction

Adrienne Rich

Poetry

W.W.Norton

Drawing on her journals, letters, dreams, memories, and careful readings of many poets, the award-winning poet reflects on the influence of literature on American life and politics today. By the author of An Atlas of the Difficult World.

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

History & Criticism

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Leaflets is Adrienne Rich's fifth book of poems. It contains twenty-eight new poems, five adaptations of Dutch, Yiddish, and Russian poets, and a sequence of seventeen poems loosely based on the ghazal, a common form in Middle Eastern poetic tradition; these ghazals comprise a kind of notebook of a month in the summer of 1968. The themes of this book are the poetics of violence and the poetics of love. Its impulse is the deepening of recognitions through language, in a time of ignorance and mutilation. Miss Rich has written: "For a poet...there is this primary labor with words. But I have the notion that how you live your life has something to do with it―that morality, for a poet, is a refusal of blinders, of traditional consolations, a courage to be alone, or wounded....A willingness to step out into the fog, to take paths which may lead nowhere. Certainty, predictability, are the first supports that have to go. I see the poetry of things as standing in resistance to brute mechanistic force, the charge of the rhinoceros with its head down. To discover―literally―this poetry and re-create it in language is a poet's essential action."

Leaflets: Poems 1965-1968

W.W.Norton&Company

Book of poems from the period 1971-1972 by the author.

Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972

These essays trace a distinguished writer's engagement with her time, her arguments with herself and others. "I am a poet who knows the social power of poetry, a United States citizen who knows herself irrevocably tangled in her society's hopes, arrogance, and despair," Adrienne Rich writes. The essays in Arts of the Possible search for possibilities beyond a compromised, degraded system, seeking to imagine something else. They call on the fluidity of the imagination, from poetic vision to social justice, from the badlands of political demoralization to an art that might wound, that may open scars when engaged in its work, but will finally suture and not tear apart. This volume collects Rich's essays from the last decade of the twentieth century, including four earlier essays, as well as several conversations that go further than the usual interview. Also included is her essay explaining her reasons for declining the National Medal for the Arts.

Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

This wonderful book: Adrienne, Rich Poetry: Texts of the Poems is a joy. The editor have carefully chooses their materials to provide the opportunity for an on-going study in the classroom, of an important American poet.

Adrienne Rich's Poetry: Texts of the Poems; The Poet on Her Work; Reviews and Criticism (Norton Critical Edition)

A selection of poems from nine of Adrienne Rich's earlier books, to which she adds new work and four early "lost" poems.

The Fact of a Door Frame

WW Norton & Co.

In this reissue of 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.

Diving Into The Wreck: Poems 1971-1972

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems

W. W. Norton & Co., Ltd.

This Norton Critical Edition presents the work of one of America's foremost poets. It moves well beyond the scope of its predecessor, Adrienne Rich's Poetry (1975), in giving proper recognition to Rich's extraordinary achievements in both poetry and prose in recent years. The result is a judiciously edited, sensibly annotated volume ideally suited for classroom study of one of our most distinguished working writers. In both poetry and prose, the editors have chosen selections intended to give readers a clear sense of Rich's evolution and accomplishment. Many of the poems in this expanded collection are from Rich's five recent volumes―The Dream of a Common Language (1978), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 (1989), and An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991). Prose selections include "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," Rich's canonical statement on feminism; "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," on being a lesbian in a heterosexual world; Rich's interview for American Poetry Review, which presents a full and frank discussion of her work; and her previously unpublished commentary on the genesis of the poem "Yom Kippur 1984." The editors have also taken into account the many essays on Rich and reviews of her work that have been published since 1975. Some earlier biographical selections have been replaced with works that focus on the quality of Rich's writing and her place in twentieth-century American literature―not just as a poet, but as a woman, a lesbian, and a mother. Criticism includes thirteen reviews and interpretations of Rich's work by W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Helen Vendler, Judith McDaniel, Adrian Oktenberg, Charles Altieri, and Joanna Feit Diehl, among others. A second recent study by Albert Gelpi traces the events in Rich's life from which her work evolves. An updated Chronology and Selected Bibliography, as well as an expanded Index, are included.

Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Editions)

Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi

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Books by Adrienne Rich