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Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems

Selections from the Depression-era cycle of poems, “The Book of the Dead,” to her late collections, The Speed of Darkness, Breaking Open, and The Gates. More

Edited by Adrienne Rich

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

The poetry of Muriel Rukeyser confronts the turbulent currents of 20th-century history, as it explores with depth and honesty the realms of politics, sexuality, mythic imagination, technological change, and family life. She was a social activist of unwavering commitment, a tireless experimenter who opened fresh forms and fresh subject matter in modern American poetry, and a writer who was constantly testing her own limits in a life’s work of extraordinary scope.

“She refused to compartmentalize herself or her work,” writes editor Adrienne Rich, “claiming her right to intellect and sexuality, poetry and science, Marxism and myth, activism and motherhood, theory and vision. . . . She was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair.” This new selection provides an indispensable introduction to her adventurous and prolific work.

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) published nearly twenty volumes of poetry include Fox: Poems 1998–2000; Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998; and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995. She has received the Bollingen Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Book Award, among other honors.

About the American Poets Project
Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.
Table of Contents

Introduction by Adrienne Rich

from Theory of Flight (1935)
Poem Out of Childhood
Effort at Speech Between Two People
Notes for a Poem
Sand-Quarry with Moving Figures
Three Sides of a Coin
This House, This Country
The Structure of the Plane
Study in a Late Subway

from U.S. 1 (1938)
from The Book of the Dead
The Road
Statement: Philippa Allen
Gauley Bridge
The Disease
The Cornfield
The Dam
The Book of the Dead
Girl at the Play
Homage to Literature
More of a Corpse Than a Woman
Woman and Emblems

from A Turning Wind (1939)
First Elegy. Rotten Lake
Third Elegy. The Fear of Form
Fifth Elegy. A Turning Wind
Reading Time : 1 Minute 26 Seconds
Tree of Days
Paper Anniversary
From the Duck-Pond to the Carousel
Judith
from Lives
Gibbs
Ann Burlak

from Beast in View (1944)
Ajanta
Child in the Great Wood
Darkness Music
Drunken Girl
The Minotaur
Gift-Poem
Leg in a Plaster Cast
Bubble of Air
from Letter to the Front
I. “Women and poets see the truth arrive”
IV. Sestina
VII. “To be a Jew in the twentieth century”
IX. “Among all the waste …”

from The Green Wave (1948)
Eyes of Night-Time
Salamander
Green Limits
Foghorn in Horror
Then I Saw What the Calling Was
from Nine Poems for the Unborn Child
II. “They came to me and said …”
VII. “You will enter the world …”

from Body of Waking (1958)
F.O.M.
“Long Enough”
Pouring Milk Away
The Sixth Night : Waking

from Waterlily Fire (1962)
Waterlily Fire

from The Speed of Darkness (1968)
The Poem as Mask: Orpheus
The Conjugation of the Paramecium
Double Dialogue
Orgy
What I See
Gift
Cries from Chiapas
For My Son
Poem
The Power of Suicide
Bunk Johnson Blowing
What They Said
The Backside of the Academy
The Outer Banks
Käthe Kollwitz

from Breaking Open (1973)
Despisals
Looking at Each Other
Waiting for Icarus
In Her Burning
Myth
A Simple Experiment
Ballad of Orange and Grape
From a Play: Publisher’s Song

from The Gates (1976)
St. Roach
Painters
Ms. Lot
Resurrection of the Right Side
The Wards
Destruction of Grief
Burnishing, Oakland

Biographical Note
Note on the Texts
Notes
Index of Titles and First Lines

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ISBN: 978-1-931082-58-7 205 pages

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