BOOK NEWS: How Adrienne Rich's political interests affect her later poetry

Adrienne Rich’s Later Poetry: Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanism

By Alec Marsh

Bloomsbury, 2025

ISBN: 9781350466975

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/adrienne-richs-later-poetry-9781350466975/

Reorienting understandings of Adrienne Rich's later work through her interest in Marx and Marxist politics, this book engages with this overlooked part of her oeuvre through considerations of issues such as race, nationhood, and gender.

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From 1983 onward, after she visited revolutionary Nicaragua until the end of her life, Rich's political vision can best be described as Marxist-Humanist. Until recently, very little attention has been paid to Rich's “interest” in Marx; there is no in-depth treatment of the effect of Marx's humanistic philosophy on Rich's later work, or even on her unwavering, but altered dedication to Women's Liberation. This book fills this gap, showing how Rich's discovery of Marx's humanism affected her poetry. In doing so, it makes a significant intervention into debates about the direction of American poetics and argues powerfully for a greater consciousness of political engagement through poetry.

Contents:

Chapter 1: 'I Long Ago Moved On': Adrienne Rich, Raya Dunayevskaya and Marxist-Humanism

Chapter 2: Marxist Humanism, Freedom and Raya Dunayevskaya

Chapter 3: Adrienne Rich “Feeling Contradictions” Nicaragua, and Your Native Land, Your Life.

Chapter 4: In Quest of America: The Dialectical Dimensions of “An Atlas of the Difficult World”

Chapter 5: Chapter Five: Suffering in the Heart of Capital: Dark Fields of the Republic

Chapter 6: American Innocence, the German 'Guilt Question” and the Oslo Peace Process.

Chapter 7: The End of History and the Forgotten Future: Rich vs. Neoliberalism

Chapter 8: Fox: “Terza Rima” and the End of History

Chapter 9: Salvaging Midnight Salvage

Chapter 10: Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: “Draft #2006” An American Jeremiad

Chapter 11: 9/11 and The School Among the Ruins: “Tendril”

Chapter 12: Rich in the Borderlands: Late Style and Her World of Pain

"Written in an open and eloquent style, this book makes a significant intervention into debates about the direction of American poetics, and argues powerfully for a greater consciousness of political engagement through the genre." —Steven Matthews, University of Reading

Alec Marsh is professor of English at Muhlenberg College. He is the author of Ezra Pound's Washington Cantos and the Struggle for Light (2021), William Carlos Williams and the Prose of Pure Experience (2016), John Kasper and Ezra Pound: Saving the Republic (2015), Ezra Pound (2011), and others.