Collected early poems, 1950-1970

the long version

With more than 700,000 copies of her books sold, Adrienne Rich's work is unequaled today in reclaiming serious poetry from scholars and returning it to the lives of general readers. Collected here for the first time are more than 200 poems: all those in her first six books plus a dozen others of those decades. From her first publication, when she was twenty-one, in the prestigious Yale Younger Poets series, the successive volumes of Rich's poems have both charted the growth of her own mind and vision, and mirrored our tempestuous, unsettled age. Her unmistakable voice, speaking even from the earliest poems with rare assurance and precision, wrestles with urgent questions while never failing to explore new poetic territory. This collection is a triumphant assertion of the centrality of poetry in our intertwined personal and political realms, and it confirms Rich's position among the enduring poets of our language.