The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004

Download or read book The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 written by Adrienne Rich and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-01-17 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.