"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.

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."

The poetry of Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80) confronts the turbulent currents of modern history as it explores with depth and honesty the realms of politics, sexuality, mythic imagination, technological change and family life. Rukeyser was a social activist of unwavering commitment, a tireless experimenter who opened fresh forms and fresh subject-matter in modern American poetry, and a writer who was constantly testing her own limits in a life's work of extraordinary scope. She held a visionary belief in the human capacity to create social change through language, and earned an international reputation as a powerful voice against enforced silences of all kind, against the violence of war, poverty and racism. Edited and introduced by Adrienne Rich, this new selection provides an indispensable introduction to the adventurous and prolific work of one of the most significant and influential American poets of the 20th century.

Author of more than thirty books, Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation, bringing discussions of gender, race and class to the forefront of poetical discourse. Selected Poems offers a full and representative selection of poems from the whole of Rich’s long and distinguished career. The volume 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 expresses the vital dialogue between Rich’s personal experiences and political views. As the editors explain in their introduction, Selected Poems presents the complete picture of Rich’s powerful and deeply moving poetry, as well as the evolution in poetic forms that trace her radical vision.

Adrienne Rich's Later Poems Selected and New displays the strong trajectory of the work of one of the most distinguished artists of American letters. After her death Rich left a manuscript 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 labour 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.

In Later Poems: Selected and New 1971-2012, the strong trajectory of the work of one of the most important artists of American letters is on display. This volume brings together a remarkable body of work. 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 most recent volume, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, along with ten powerful new poems, previously uncollected. 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 "Teethsucking Bird" reminds us of what we have been told to forget. 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.

The Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of Adrienne Rich's most renowned essays, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision. Her thoughts on feminism, poetry, race, homosexuality and identity are still powerful and relevant today. Discussing everything from her fearless poetic vision to her revolutionary views on social justice, Rich's essays unite the political, personal and poetical. Included are Rich's landmark essays "Motherhood as Experience and Institution"; "What Is Found There"; "Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts" and "Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence". As Sandra Gilbert writes, "To re-read and to re-think Rich's prose as a complete oeuvre is to encounter a major public intellectual..."

In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience-as a woman, a poet, a feminist and a mother-she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A "powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection" (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionised how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award-winning writer Eula Biss, the book resounds with as much wisdom and insight today as when it was first written.

The Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of Adrienne Rich’s most renowned essays, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision. Her thoughts on feminism, poetry, race, homosexuality and identity are still powerful and relevant today. Discussing everything from her fearless poetic vision to her revolutionary views on social justice, Rich’s essays unite the political, personal and poetical. Included are Rich’s landmark essays “Motherhood as Experience and Institution�; “What Is Found There�; “Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts� and “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence�. As Sandra Gilbert writes, “To re-read and to re-think Rich’s prose as a complete oeuvre is to encounter a major public intellectual...�

Here is the good stuff: poetry written by women that actually excites the thinking reader. This anthology, spanning work of the last 75 years, will broaden its readers' notions of what defines erotic poetry. For what is more intriguing, more satisfying than strong, self-assured writing? This groundbreaking anthology includes some of our most powerful women writers-among them Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Sexton, Dorianne Laux, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, and Louise Gluck. These poets fully demonstrate that, far from being prurient, the erotic can permeate even the most mundane aspects of life, from reading a book to buying clothes. At the same time, the collection affirms the enormous meaningfulness of poetry-its ability to express the inexpressible and to illuminate the most private and intimate of human experiences. The poets included here represent different ethnicities, geographies, social classes, and sexual preferences. The only characteristic they share is that they are women writing about sex.

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.

"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

"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

Anne Bradstreet was one of our earliest feminists and the first true poet in the American colonies. This collection of her extant poetry and prose, scrupulously edited by Jeannine Hensley, has long been the standard edition of Bradstreet's work. Hensley's introduction sketches the poet's life, and Adrienne Rich's foreword offers a sensitive critique of Bradstreet as a person and as a writer. The John Harvard Library edition includes a chronology of Bradstreet's life and an updated bibliography.

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.

From their first publication, when Rich was twenty-one, in the prestigious Yale Younger Poets series, the successive volumes of her poetry have both charted the growth of her own mind and vision and mirrored our tempestuous, unsettled age. Her unmistakable voice, speaking even from the earliest poems with rare assurance and precision, wrestles with urgent questions while never failing to explore new poetic territory. In Collected Early Poems, readers will once again bear witness to Rich's triumphant assertion of the centrality of poetry in our intertwined personal and political lives.

"In this collection, Ms. Rich has shown both a deep knowledge of her subject, women, and a fine mastery of her craft, timeless contemporary poetry. Above all, she has not abandoned the struggle of 'trying to live/in a clear-headed tenderness' and translating her efforts into critical signposts for those who follow."—Kansas City Star

"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

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"

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."

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.

Companion Spider is the accumulated work of a poet and translator who goes more deeply into the art and its process and demands than anyone since Robert Duncan. Clayton Eshleman is one of our most admired and controversial poets, the translator of such great international poets as Cesar Vallejo, Aime Cesaire and Antonin Artaud, and founder and editor of two important literary magazines, Sulfur and Caterpillar. As such, Eshleman writes about the vocation of poet and of the poet as translator as no one else in America today; he believes adamantly that art must concern itself with vision, and that poets learn best by an apprenticeship that is a kind of immersion in the work of other poets.
Companion Spider opens with a unique eighty page essay called "Novices: A Study of Poetic Apprenticeship" addressed to the poet who is just starting out. Subsequent sections take up the art of translation, poets and their work, and literary magazine editing. The title is drawn from an extraordinary visionary experience which the author had, which becomes a potent metaphor for the creative process. Through the variety of poets and artists to whom he pays homage, Eshleman suggests a community which is not of a single place or time; rather, there is mutual recognition and responsiveness, so that the reader becomes aware of a range of artistic practices s/he might explore

"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

From Simon & Schuster, in its ninth year, The Best American Poetry 1996 is universally acclaimed as the best anthology in the field. The compilation includes a diverse abundance of poems published in 1995 in more than 40 publications ranging from The New Yorker to The Paris Review to Bamboo Ridge.