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Selected Poems

1950-2012
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( 195 ratings, 28 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Selected Poems spans six decades of Adrienne Rich's influential poetry, highlighting her pioneering role as a writer, activist, and intellectual. This comprehensive collection captures the evolution of Rich's work, from her early feminist breakthroughs to later bold and experimental poems. Featuring iconic pieces such as Diving into the Wreck, Planetarium, and The Phenomenology of Anger, the volume reveals the dynamic interplay between Rich's personal experience and political commitments.
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This collection is ideal for readers interested in feminist literature, social justice, and 20th-century American poetry, as well as those who appreciate poetry that entwines the personal with the political.

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Sixty years of poems from a National Book Award winner and pioneering writer, activist and intellectual.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Sixty years of poems from a National Book Award winner and pioneering writer, activist, and intellectual.

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 workβ€”the clear-sighted and passionate feminist poems of the 1970s, including β€œDiving into the Wreck,” β€œPlanetarium,” and β€œThe 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 β€œNorth American Time” and β€œCalle VisiΓ³n,” 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.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Critics hail Rich as one of the greatest American poets of the past fifty years, praising her authentic and urgent voice. The San Francisco Chronicle describes her as a singular presence, while poet W. S. Merwin highlights the essential and unpredictable nature of her work throughout her career.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780393355116

Publisher: WW Norton & Co

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 11 September 2018

Country: United States

Imprint: WW Norton & Co

Contributors:

  • Edited by Albert Gelpi
  • Edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi
  • Edited by Brett C. Millier

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 33.0mm

Width: 140.0mm

Height: 211.0mm

Weight: 386g

Pages: 464

About the Author

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major public intellectual of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Diving into the Wreck, and more than a half-dozen of prose. Albert Gelpi is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature at Stanford University, where he has also taught since 1968. His books include Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet, The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet, and, most recently, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950. He is the editor of Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism and Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism and for a decade edited Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi is Professor of English at Stanford University, where she has taught since 1968. She is the author of ShelleyΓ­s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity and Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature, as well as numerous articles on, mainly, feminist and psychological literature. She is an editor of several important volumes, including Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideologies and Women and Poverty. Brett C. Millier is the Reginald L. Cook Professor of American Literature at Middlebury College. She is the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, and Flawed Light: American Women Poets and Alcohol. She is also associate editor of The Columbia History of American Poetry.

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    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 experienceβ€”as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a motherβ€”she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all...
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  • Later Poems: Selected and New
    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....
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  • The Dream of a Common Language
    The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman's heart and mind in language for everybodyβ€”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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  • Diving into the Wreck
    Diving into the Wreck is a powerful collection that invites readers into the depths of exploration and introspection. "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 Adrienne Rich's...
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  • Essential Essays
    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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  • Adrienne Rich: Poetry and Prose
    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 volumesβ€”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...
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