Gathering reviews and essays which examine Rich's poetry and prose, this text also looks at how critical opinion about her works has changed.

Cartographies of Silence comprises over 100 untitled poem fragments-what the poet calls 'unconscious interruptions'-that navigate maps of being/non-being, writing/speaking/thinking, to reveal the mind-body experience where silence meets language.Poems include: the time you need in your bodyto do your work heremy bodyan exploding stupamy breatha sutra of silenceandor in the spaces betweenopening your whole attentionwhile listeningtouchingbreathinner beingfocusfeel the soundblessed audiblysaturated with passive formmy body will break opennext timeyou will feel the body of spaceinside this bodyadvance into the ligh

“Certain lines had become like incantations to me, words I’d chanted to myself through sorrow and confusion” —Cheryl Strayed, Wild “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

In her six-decade long writing career Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) addressed, with sagacity and probing honesty, most of the significant issues of her lifetime. A poet of finely tuned craft, she won numerous prizes, awards, and honorary degrees, and famously rejected the prestigious National Medal for the Arts in 1997. She wrote twenty-five volumes of poetry and seven non-fiction books as she combined the roles of poet, scholar, theorist, and activist. Rich wrote passionately and powerfully about major 20th and early 21st century concerns such as feminism, racism, sexism, the Vietnam War, Marxism, militarism, the growing income disparities in the U.S., and other social issues. Her works ask important questions about how we should act, and what we should believe. They imagine new ways to deal with the social and political challenges of the twentieth century. Setting her work in the context of her life and American politics and culture during her lifetime, this book explores Rich’s poetic and personal journey from conservative, dutiful follower of cultural and poetic traditions to challenging questioner and critic, from passivity and powerlessness to activist, theorist, and acclaimed “poet of the oppositional imagination.”

Poetic Revolutionaries is an exploration of the relationship between radical textual practice, social critique and subversion. From an introduction considering recent debates regarding the cultural politics of intertextuality allied to avant-garde practice, the study proceeds to an exploration of texts by a range of writers for whom formal and poetic experimentation is allied to a subversive politics: Jean Genet, Monique Wittig, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Kathleen Mary Fallon, Kim Scott and Brian Castro. Drawing on theories of avant-garde practice, intertextuality, parody, representation, and performance such as those of Mikhaïl Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Gérard Genette, Margaret A. Rose, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, Ross Chambers and Judith Butler, these readings explore how a confluence of writing strategies – covering the structural, narratological, stylistic and scenographic – can work to boost a text’s subversive power.