"The Will to Change is an extraordinary book of poems...It has the urgency of a prisoner's journal: patient, laconic, eloquent, as if determined thoughts were set down in stolen moments." —David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review "The Will to Change must be read whole: for its tough distrust of completion and for its cool declaratives which fix us with a stare more unsettling than the most hysterical questions...It includes moments when poverty and heroism explode grammer with their own dignified unsyntactical demands...The poems are about departures, about the pain of breaking away from lovers and from an old sense of self. They discover the point where loneliness and politics touch, where the exercise of the radical courage takes its inevitable toll."—David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review

Leaflets is Adrienne Rich's fifth book of poems. It contains twenty-eight new poems, five adaptations of Dutch, Yiddish, and Russian poets, and a sequence of seventeen poems loosely based on the ghazal, a common form in Middle Eastern poetic tradition; these ghazals comprise a kind of notebook of a month in the summer of 1968. The themes of this book are the poetics of violence and the poetics of love. Its impulse is the deepening of recognitions through language, in a time of ignorance and mutilation. Miss Rich has written: "For a poet...there is this primary labor with words. But I have the notion that how you live your life has something to do with it—that morality, for a poet, is a refusal of blinders, of traditional consolations, a courage to be alone, or wounded....A willingness to step out into the fog, to take paths which may lead nowhere. Certainty, predictability, are the first supports that have to go. I see the poetry of things as standing in resistance to brute mechanistic force, the charge of the rhinoceros with its head down. To discover—literally—this poetry and re-create it in language is a poet's essential action."

“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

This examination of the lives and poetic works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich and Gwendolyn Brooks focuses on the historical struggles between women writers and feminists. It traces the conflict that has taken place through the generations.

This book features a collection of essays on some of the key poets of post-war America, written by leading scholars in the field. All the essays have been newly commissioned to take account of the diverse movements in American poetry since 1945, and also to reflect, retrospectively, on some of the major talents that have shaped its development. In the aftermath of the Second World War, American poets took stock of their own tumultuous past but faced the future with radically new artistic ideals and commitments. More than ever before, American poetry spoke with its own distinctive accents and declared its own dreams and desires. This is the era of confessionalism, beat poetry, protest poetry, and avant-garde postmodernism. This book explores the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, as well as contemporary African American poets and new poetic voices emerging in the 21st century. This New Casebook introduces the major American poets of the post-war generation, evaluates their achievements in the light of changing critical opinion, and offers lively, incisive readings of some of the most challenging and enthralling poetry of the modern era.

More than 200 poems collected from Adrienne Rich's first six books, plus a dozen others of those decades. 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 Open Admissions Danica Savonick traces the largely untold story of the teaching experience of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich at the City University of New York (cuny) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This period, during which cuny guaranteed tuition-free admission to every city high school graduate, was one of the most controversial in US educational history. Analyzing their archival teaching materials—syllabi, lesson plans, and assignments—alongside their published work, Savonick reveals how these renowned writers were also transformative educators who developed creative methods of teaching their students to navigate and change the world. In fact, many of their methods—such as student-led courses, collaborative public projects, and the publication of student writing—anticipated the kinds of student-centered and antiracist pedagogies that have become popular in recent years. In addition to recovering the pedagogical legacy of these writers, Savonick shows how teaching in cuny’s free and open classrooms fundamentally altered their writing and, with it, the course of American literature and feminist criticism.