The School among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004

by Adrienne Rich

Overview

"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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393327557
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/17/2006
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	116
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

Art and conviction have always mixed well in Rich's work-which is some accomplishment-but her recent Fox: Poems 1999-2000 seemed perhaps a bit mellower. With her newest collection, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, she's back in fighting form, decrying the "school among the ruins" in Baghdad and other calamities of the 21st century. (LJ 9/1/05) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal