Adrienne Rich

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991

Adrienne Rich

• 1992 LATimes–Poetry winner
• 1992 Lenore Marshall winner
• 1992 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• 1991 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 32.42

“This is no place you ever knew me,” writes Adrienne Rich in her major new work, “…These are not the roads/you knew me by.” As always in her forty-year career, this major poet has mapped out new territory , astonishing and enlightening us with her penetrating insight into our lives amid the beauties and cruelties of our difficult world.

The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004

Adrienne Rich

• 2004 NBCC–Poetry winner
• Score: 10.54

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:…

Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972

Adrienne Rich

• 1974 NBA–Poetry winner
• Score: 10.24

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 of 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.

Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998

Adrienne Rich

• 2000 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.5

“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 violence. Adrienne 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…

Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988

Adrienne Rich

• 1990 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• Score: 6.4

The author of “Dreams of a Common Language”, “Your Native Land, Your Life” and “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” presents a new collection of poetry which focuses on the power of time: memory and its contradictions, death, and the meaning of human responsibility.