The school among the ruins

the long version

"In this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem evokes the lessons 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 public crisis upon individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account."--BOOK JACKET.