The school among the ruins : poems, 2000-2004
(Book)

In this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem, in a young schoolteacher's voice, evokes the lessons that children (Not of course here) learn amid violence and hatred, "when the whole town flinches/blood on the undersole thickening to glass." Usonian Journals 2000 intercuts faces and conversations, building to a dystopic/utopic vision. Throughout these fierce and musical poems, Rich traces the imprint of a public crisis on individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account.