Praise for Adrienne Rich’s Arts of the Possible

“A major American poet and intellectual most concerned with the intersection of the public and private, the social and personal. . . . What’s perhaps most fascinating—and rewarding—about this collection is charting Rich’s intellectual journey itself.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Knight-like, [Rich] has fought dragons for decades: anger, victimization, deceit and separation. She wanders, searching for the ‘honorable human relationship’ she first described in 1979, that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love.’ In the end, Rich always comes home to language and creation. She wants to wake us up. She wants to be awakened.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

To read poet Rich’s sharp, clear, and uncompromising essays on gender, art, and social responsibility, is to enter a place where the light is brighter than in everyday life, where sound is crisper, and the line between right and wrong holds firm, a mental space that enables readers to step back from the usual clamor and recognize just how vulgar and dishonest most public discourse truly is.”

—Booklist

“Adrienne Rich has always been a remarkable writer, keenly intellectual, uncompromisingly rigorous, yet also a gifted literary prose stylist, profoundly artistic. The essays in Arts of the Possible are difficult yet rewarding, part of the reward being the beauty of the prose.” —Lambda Book Report “For nearly half a century the voice of Adirenne Rich has charted America’s changing mental, emotional, and moral landscape in poetry and essays fueled by the twin motives of a thirst for justice and a quest to stretch the imagination. Arts of the Possible lets us follow the trajectory of her thinking—from the now classic “When We Dead Awaken: Poetry as Revision” through her engagements with issues of gender and sexuality, language and its corruptions, political systems and their possibilities—keenly arguing with herself and others, avidly reading other poetries around the globe, and always asking how poetry can break free of its traps to further what is ‘humanly possible’ in our lives. The work is inspired and inspiring.”

—Alicia Ostriker

“Adrienne Rich in these talks and essays is so clear and clean and thorough. I learn from her again and again—not only who she is as the woman in this last half century but who I am—and why.”

—Grace Paley