The School Among the Ruins
Poems 2000-2004

Confronts dislocations and upheavals at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This work traces the imprint of public crisis upon individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account.

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.