Adrienne Rich extends her poetic language as witness to the treasures - the midnight salvage - we rescue from fear and fragmentation.

Rich's work has long challenged social plausibilities built on violence and demoralizing power. In Midnight Salvage, she continues her explorations at the end of the century, trying, as she has said, "to race the terrible with hope, in language as complex as necessary, as communicative as possible -- a poetics which can work as antidote to complacency, self-involvement and despair. I have wanted to assume a theater of voices rather than the restricted I. To write for both readers I know exist and those I can only imagine, finding their own salvaged beauty as I have found mine."