Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 - Softcover

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed, and widely taught, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose. Her constellation of honors includes a National Book Award for poetry for Tonight, No Poetry Will Serve, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1994, and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for Diving Into the Wreck. That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork. Ms. Rich’s other volumes of poetry include The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, An Atlas of the Difficult World, The School Among the Ruins, and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. Her prose includes the essay collections On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; Blood, Bread, and Poetry; an influential essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” and the nonfiction book Of Woman Born, which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct. In 2006, Rich was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. In 2010, she was honored with The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award.

Rich is the author of the prize-winning Your Native Land, Your Life and 12 other books of poems, yet these lucid, searching essays spring from her involvement since the early '70s with the feminist movement, and, where they touch on poetry, examine the social and political contexts of its making. In some of them Rich explores her complex identity as white, middle-class, Jewish, lesbian and American, and discusses her radicalization through the influence, largely, of Mary Wollstonecraft, James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir. In other pieces she assails "enforced heterosexuality" and, as it obtains in academia as well as society at large, "the ideology of white male supremacy." Rich, who visited the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, considers that the United States has been "deep-frozen for decades in the Cold War," but believes that American feminism, and especially black American feminism, can do much to foster the movements for sexual and political freedom throughout the world.
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