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.

Reviews

"In An Atlas of the Difficult World Rich says: 'We write from the marrow of our bones.' So she has written since the 1960s, saying what we longed to say, but could not, or dared not. She is a crucial poet: each volume more courageous, newly elegant. In this book she makes me, even in these harsh times, brave, toughened by her boldness, her skill." -- Carolyn G. Heilbrun

"In An Atlas of the Difficult World Rich says: 'We write from the marrow of our bones.' So she has written since the 1960s, saying what we longed to say, but could not, or dared not. She is a crucial poet: each volume more courageous, newly elegant. In this book she makes me, even in these harsh times, brave, toughened by her boldness, her skill." -- Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Rich's 13th collection of poems is mostly a free-verse montage on America's broken promises and latent possibilities (``This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms / This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms''). The work jarringly evokes a country fissured by poverty, loneliness, oppression of women, a nation that has not met the human needs of its citizens. Fulfilling her definition of a patriot as one who ``wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being,'' Rich mingles the personal and political in forthright meditations on the world's anguish and beauty. Intermittently rising to powerful moments, this tapestry of the world's disenfranchised and downtrodden fails to coalesce into a unified whole. (Oct.)