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.
- ISBN10 0393070778
- ISBN13 9780393070774
- Publish Date 17 January 2006 (first published 8 October 2004)
- Publish Status Active
- Imprint W. W. Norton & Company
- Format eBook
- Pages 112
- Language English