The Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of Adrienne Rich's most renowned essays, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision. Her thoughts on feminism, poetry, race, homosexuality and identity are still powerful and relevant today. Discussing everything from her fearless poetic vision to her revolutionary views on social justice, Rich's essays unite the political, personal and poetical.

Included are Rich's landmark essays "Motherhood as Experience and Institution"; "What Is Found There"; "Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts" and "Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence". As Sandra Gilbert writes, "To re-read and to re-think Rich's prose as a complete oeuvre is to encounter a major public intellectual..."

About the Author
Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major public intellectual of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry, including the National Book Award-winning Diving into the Wreck, and more than a half-dozen of prose. Sandra M. Gilbert is a distinguished literary critic and poet. Together with Susan Gubar, she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the NBCC. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Reviews
"I once read that a blue whale's arteries are so large that an adult human could swim through them. That's what entering these essays feels like - to flow along with the pulses of Rich's intelligence, to be enveloped by her capacious heart and mind." -- International New York Times
"Rich urges us to stand up, look around and question outdated politics in a startlingly modern flourish. These essays are aptly named; they are indeed essential." -- The Irish Times



Book Information
ISBN 9780393652369
Author Adrienne Rich
Format Hardback
Page Count 352
Imprint WW Norton & Co
Publisher WW Norton & Co
Weight(grams) 843g
Dimensions(mm) 244mm * 165mm * 36mm