Essential Essays
Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry
12 October 2018
Territory Rights — Worldwide.
Description
A career-spanning selection of the lucid, courageous and boldly political prose of National Book Award winner Adrienne Rich.
The Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of Adrienne Rich’s most renowned essays, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision. Her thoughts on feminism, poetry, race, homosexuality and identity are still powerful and relevant today. Discussing everything from her fearless poetic vision to her revolutionary views on social justice, Rich’s essays unite the political, personal and poetical.
Included are Rich’s landmark essays “Motherhood as Experience and Institution”; “What Is Found There”; “Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts” and “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence”. As Sandra Gilbert writes, “To re-read and to re-think Rich’s prose as a complete oeuvre is to encounter a major public intellectual...”
Reviews
"I once read that a blue whale’s arteries are so large that an adult human could swim through them. That’s what entering these essays feels like — to flow along with the pulses of Rich’s intelligence, to be enveloped by her capacious heart and mind." — International New York Times
"Rich urges us to stand up, look around and question outdated politics in a startlingly modern flourish. These essays are aptly named; they are indeed essential." — The Irish Times
Also By: Adrienne Rich 
Leaflets: Poems 1965-1968
Paperback, 1969
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems, 1954-1962
Paperback, 1967
"The risk this book quietly takes, and impressively fulfills, is no less than to get life said.... Newly freed from the metrical conventions of her earlier books, Adrienne Rich has lost none of her...
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Paperback, 2021
The groundbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation.
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
E Book, 2021
The groundbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation.
Selected Poems: 1950-2012
Paperback, 2018
Sixty years of poems from a National Book Award winner and pioneering writer, activist and intellectual.
Also By: Sandra M. Gilbert
Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination
Paperback, 2022
A brilliant, sweeping history of the contemporary women’s movement told through the lives and works of the literary women who shaped it
Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination
Hardback, 2021
A brilliant, sweeping history of the contemporary women’s movement told through the lives and works of the literary women who shaped it.
Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination
E Book, 2021
A brilliant, sweeping history of the contemporary women’s movement told through the lives and works of the literary women who shaped it
Judgment Day: Poems
Paperback, 2019
Bringing together physical and metaphysical, elegy and celebration, Judgment Day is rich with grace and insight.
Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing
Paperback, 2017
A glorious survey of food writing from the classical world to the present.
