An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991

by Adrienne Rich

Overview

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

In this, her thirteenth book of verse, the author of "The Dream of a Common Language" and "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" writes of war, oppression, the future, death, mystery, love and the magic of poetry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393345742
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/16/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	398 KB

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

The heart of Rich's 13th collection of poetry is its title poem, a devastating song of the new American self. A long work in 13 sections, it moves from West Coast to East and back again, cataloging our wealth and despair: ``Here is a map of our country:/ here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt.'' The concerns of this masterpiece and of the other poems in the volume will be familiar to the poet's large, appreciative audience: politics, love--particularly between women--problems of survival, isolation, impotence, and marginality. But while this author is often celebrated or disparaged for her polemics, she continues to write some of the most powerful descriptive verse of our time: ``Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud/between winter-stiff, ranged apple trees/each netted in transparent air,/ thin sinking light, heartsick within and filmed/ in heartsickness around you, gelatin cocoon/ invisible yet impervious.'' Highly recommended.-- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York

Library Journal