The School Among the Ruins
Poems 2000-2004
A new work by a distinguished poet.
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.
"One of a handful of major American poets whose every new work is a cause for excitement, Rich is...stunning in her use of skewed, penetrating language."—Library Journal
Adrienne Rich is the recipient of numerous honors, most recently the 2003 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. She lives in northern California.
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