Adrienne Rich

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.

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.

“We are in the presence here of a major American poet whose voice at mid-century in her own life is increasingly marked by moral passion.”― New York Times Book Review

Through a wide range of poetic pieces, Adrienne Rich explores in this collection the intricacies of being white, female, lesbian, Jewish, and a U.S. citizen, both at this time of her life and through the lens of her past.

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.

"Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" is a 1980 essay by Adrienne Rich, which was also published in her 1986 book Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 as a part of the radical feminism movement of the late '60s, '70s, and '80s. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" is a text that is constructed to think about and inspire change about lesbian visibility, structures of lesbian sexuality, and the role of literary criticism in relationship to lesbianism. Adrienne Rich argues that heterosexuality is not "natural" or intrinsic in human instincts, but an institution imposed upon many cultures and societies that render women in a subordinate situation. It was written to challenge the erasure of lesbian existence from a large amount of scholarly feminist literature. It was not written to widen divisions but to encourage heterosexual feminists to examine heterosexuality as a political institution which disempowers women and to change it.

A new book of poems by one of America's most distinguished poets."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 conversations actual and imaginary, actions taken for better or for worse, out of histories and songs, humdrum and terrible events, out of the most intimate loves and love for the world. Through these poems, she extends the poet's reach of witness and power of connection, and invites the reader-listener to participate.

"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.

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.

La poesía ha sido en todo tiempo un gesto de rebeldía y de emancipación. Todos los poetas soñaron alguna vez que las palabras tenían un poder tan grande que con ellas serían capaces de acometer la transformación de los sistemas políticos, acabar con la sinrazón y crear una justicia verdadera. Adrienne Rich, una de las poetas estadounidenses más populares y celebradas del siglo xx, también soñó con el fin de la desgracia humana y con la instauración de una nueva armonía. Todo su combate contra la opresión de las mujeres lo concentró en las palabras: en redefinirlas, en darles un nuevo uso, un nuevo sentido, donde toda la historia de violencia contra ellas fuese juzgada y reescrita. El sueño de una lengua común es uno de sus libros más emblemáticos, el poemario en el que su combate y sus ideas encontraron su punto más alto y más claro. En él habla del poder de las mujeres, de los amores entre ellas, hermosos y prohibidos, y retoma una de las metáforas más antiguas de la tradición literaria: la naturaleza y su semejanza con el cuerpo femenino. Pero sobre todo es un libro que cuestiona la opresión y el silencio de las mujeres, y que imagina lo que sólo los grandes poetas han soñado: la creación de una lengua común que permita comprendernos de forma verdadera, sin herirnos, sin violentarnos, donde la existencia no sea una batalla entre todos nosotros sino la afirmación de una nueva armonía, entre hombres y mujeres, entre el ser humano y la naturaleza, una lengua para soñar por fin juntos nuestra humanidad común.

Adrienne Rich fue una poeta galardonada, una ensayista influyente, una feminista radical y la voz intelectual más importante de su generación. "Ensayos esenciales" reúne veinticinco de sus ensayos más renombrados en un solo volumen, demostrando el brillo duradero de su voz, su visión profética y sus puntos de vista revolucionarios sobre la justicia social. Los ensayos de Rich unen lo político, lo personal y lo poético como ningún otro. Enfatizando el compromiso intelectual de por vida vida de Rich, los ensayos seleccionados en este volumen van desde la década de 1960 hasta 2008. Como escribió el New York Times, Rich "llevó la opresión de mujeres y lesbianas a la vanguardia del discurso poético".

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.

"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 World

"Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" is a 1980 essay by Adrienne Rich, which was also published in her 1986 book Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 as a part of the radical feminism movement of the late '60s, '70s, and '80s. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" is a text that is constructed to think about and inspire change about lesbian visibility, structures of lesbian sexuality, and the role of literary criticism in relationship to lesbianism. Adrienne Rich argues that heterosexuality is not "natural" or intrinsic in human instincts, but an institution imposed upon many cultures and societies that render women in a subordinate situation. It was written to challenge the erasure of lesbian existence from a large amount of scholarly feminist literature. It was not written to widen divisions but to encourage heterosexual feminists to examine heterosexuality as a political institution which disempowers women and to change it.

"Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" is a 1980 essay by Adrienne Rich, which was also published in her 1986 book Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 as a part of the radical feminism movement of the late '60s, '70s, and '80s. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" is a text that is constructed to think about and inspire change about lesbian visibility, structures of lesbian sexuality, and the role of literary criticism in relationship to lesbianism. Adrienne Rich argues that heterosexuality is not "natural" or intrinsic in human instincts, but an institution imposed upon many cultures and societies that render women in a subordinate situation. It was written to challenge the erasure of lesbian existence from a large amount of scholarly feminist literature. It was not written to widen divisions but to encourage heterosexual feminists to examine heterosexuality as a political institution which disempowers women and to change it.

Este libro reúne cuatro ensayos fundamentales de la activista y escritora norteamericana Adrienne Rich: “La mujer antifeminista”, “Maternidad en cautiverio”, “Es la lesbiana en nosotras” y “Cuando las muertas despertamos”; textos que nos muestran en profundidad las ideas de una de las pensadoras más importantes acerca del lugar de la mujer en la sociedad contemporánea. Si bien es estimulante estar viva en tiempos de despertar de la consciencia, también puede ser confuso, desorientador y doloroso. Este despertar de la muerte o de la consciencia dormida ya ha afectado la vida de miles de mujeres, incluso aquellas que aún no lo saben. También está afectando la vida de los hombres, incluso a aquellos que niegan las demandas contra ellos. La discusión continuará siendo acerca de si el sistema opresivo económico de clase es responsable de la naturaleza opresiva de las relaciones hombre/mujer o, si de hecho, el patriarcado —la dominación de los hombres— es el modelo original de opresión en el cual todos los otros están basados. Pero en los últimos años, el movimiento feminista ha trazado conexiones ineludibles y esclarecedoras entre nuestras vidas sexuales y nuestras instituciones políticas. Las sonámbulas se están despertando y, por primera vez, este despertar tiene una realidad colectiva. Adrienne Rich "La lectura de estos ensayos nos lleva a encontrarnos con otras mujeres, ya sea como madres, lesbianas, escritoras o, incluso, antifeministas. La posibilidad de construir una comunidad que prescinda de la aprobación masculina, en un contexto que nos invisibiliza y excluye, como lo es el campo del conocimiento y del discurso, no sólo amplía el campo de libertad de nuestras conciencias sino que resulta de la lucha de las pensadoras feministas por existir, y por validar la literatura que se escribe por y para otras mujeres." Romina Reyes Ayala.

The final volume of poems assembled by America’s most powerful and distinctive voice. Adrienne Rich's Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971 - 2012 displays the strong trajectory of the work of one of the most distinguished artists of American letters. After her death in March 2012, Rich left behind a manuscript of mature work that speaks for her concern with a poetics of relation along with a passionate attention to craft. In addition to her selections from twelve volumes of published work, Later Poems: Selected and New contains ten powerful new poems. Among these, From Strata is a kind of archaeology of the present day; Itinerary searches for an indefinite future in a menaced landscape; For the Young Anarchists offers a trope of skilled labor for political action; and the haunting voice of the Teethsucking Bird reminds us of what we have been told to forget. These and other poems look back into history and forward into the future while engaging with contemporary moments. Rich s singular command of language continues to the end.

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. Ms. 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."

Ce recueil rassemble deux discours pionniers qui interrogent les dynamiques des luttes féministes et LGBTQIA+, depuis les années 70 jusqu’aujourd’hui. Au cœur de la pensée d’ Adrienne Rich, il y a cette articulation nécessaire entre lesbiennes et féministes. Il y a l’amour des femmes entre elles, si absent des imaginaires, qui pourrait être établi comme axiome militant. Il y a des liens à tisser et du sens à insuffler, sans cesse. Ces deux textes sont mis en perspective par Émilie Notéris & Florence Andoka : elles interrogent les conséquences des politiques de l’identité sur les mobilisations actuelles, et invitent à repenser les solidarités et le dialogue au sein des luttes.

"An impressive new volume. . . . Rich's admirers will recognize the complex symbiosis between the activist and the maker of new language, each propelling, describing, provoking the other's words."― Publishers Weekly "Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it means, to stand fast; what it means to move." In these astonishing new poems, Adrienne Rich dares to look and to extend her poetic language as witness to the treasures―the midnight salvage―we rescue from fear and fragmentation. Rich's work has long challenged social plausibilities built on violence and demoralizing power. In Midnight Salvage , she continues her explorations at the end of the century, trying, as she has said, "to face the terrible with hope, in language as complex as necessary, as communicative as possible―a poetics which can work as antidote to complacency, self-involvement, and despair. I have wanted to assume a theater of voices rather than the restricted I. To write for both readers I know exist and those I can only imagine, finding their own salvaged beauty as I have found mine." "In her vision of warning and her celebration of life, Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters."―Nadine Gordimer

The outstanding qualities of Adrienne Rich's mature work are a somber, penetrating intelligence and a swift, flashing verbal imagination. Working together, these qualities mean that the intelligence never plods and the imagination is never ungrounded in understanding. Necessities of Life, her fourth book, is an intense, compact entity. The translations from the Dutch that form its second half are not an arbitrary choice but an integral part of the whole. In recognizing and acting upon her affinity with these poems, and placing them side by side with her own new work, she further defines, for herself and for the reader, her sense of life and her poetics.

Motherhood as Experience and Institution. "In order for all women to have real choices all along the line," Adrienne Rich writes, "we need fully to understand the power and powerlessness embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture." Rich's investigation, in this influential and landmark book, concerns both experience and institution. 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 in its many variations on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance. One of our most distinguished poets, ADRIENNE RICH was born in Baltimore in 1929. Over the last forty years she has published more than seventeen volumes of poetry and five books of nonfiction prose, including Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations; On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Blood, Bread, and Poetry; and What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. She has received numerous awards, including the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Lambda Book Award, the National Book Award, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives in California.

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence is a sort of travel diary, documenting Adrienne Rich's journeys to the frontier and into the interior. It traces the development of one individual consciousness, "playing over such issues as motherhood, racism, history, poetry, the uses of scholarship, the politics of language". A. Rich has written a headnote for each essay, briefly discussing the circumstances of its writing. "I find in myself both severe and tender thoughts toward the women I have been, whose thoughts I find here".

Author inscribed "For Alice Richman" along with her signature on the title page. The book is in pristine condition!

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.

Rich's third book of poems. In Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970, Rich discusses this book as a watershed moment in the discovery of her voice.

This title is a new volume from Adrienne Rich and is one of her more unpredictable and evocative collections. Titles include: 'rhyme'' Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send', and 'Draft 2006'.

The Diamond Cutters, 1955, Adrienne Rich's second book of poems

"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

"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

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).

"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.

" The Will to Change is an extraordinary book of poems...It has the urgency of a prisoner's journal: patient, laconic, eloquent, as if determined thoughts were set down in stolen moments." ―David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review " The Will to Change must be read whole: for its tough distrust of completion and for its cool declaratives which fix us with a stare more unsettling than the most hysterical questions...It includes moments when poverty and heroism explode grammer with their own dignified unsyntactical demands...The poems are about departures, about the pain of breaking away from lovers and from an old sense of self. They discover the point where loneliness and politics touch, where the exercise of the radical courage takes its inevitable toll."―David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review

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.

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 youCan't get to the poverty of bodies lying unburiedThere's the poverty of labor offered silently on the curbThe poverty of yard sale scrapings spread And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on streetPrince let me tell you who will never learn through wordsThere are poverties and there are poverties.

Vint-i-un poemes d'amor -en realitat, vint-i-dos-, en edició bilingüe, és la segona traducció a la nostra llengua d'un llibre d'Adrienne Rich que inclou una introducció molt completa a la persona i l'obra de l'autora, i dos assaigs, inèdits així mateix en català, que complementen tant els poemes com l'ideari i l'activisme lèsbics d'una escriptora imprescindible. Malgrat els més de quaranta anys transcorreguts des de la publicació en anglés del recull i del primer dels dos assaigs, l'obra en conjunt interessa, i força. I no només per la indubtable qualitat literària dels poemes i de llur traducció, sinó també per les seues aportacions a un vertader debat sobre la (in)visibilitat d'expressions i sexualitats no-normatives en la nostra societat i en l'acadèmia. Justificar més la urgència d'aquesta publicació, així com la necessitat de continuar traduint Adrienne Rich, és, tal com diu Sant-Celoni en la introducció, «gratuït i resumible en dues perquè cal».

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.

A major American poet faces her own native land, her own life, and the result is a volume of compelling, transforming poems. The book includes two extraordinary longer works: the self-exploratory "Sources" and "Contradictions―Tracking Poems," an ongoing index of an American woman's life. The poet writes, "In these poems I have been trying to speak from, and of, and to, my country. To speak of a different claim from those staked by the patriots of the sword; to speak of the land itself, the cities, and of the imaginations that have dwelt here, at risk, unfree, assaulted, erased. I believe more than ever that the search for justice and compassion is the great wellspring for poetry in our time, throughout the world, though the theme of despair has been canonized in this country. I draw strength from the traditions of all those who, with every reason to despair, have refused to do so."