The School Among the Ruins

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