The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004

Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right. --Booklist, starred review

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.