Adrienne Rich

An Atlas of the Difficult World

"This is no place you ever knew me," writes Adrienne Rich in her major new work, ". . . These are not the roads/you knew me by." As always in her forty-year career, this major poet has mapped out new territory , astonishing and enlightening us with her penetrating insight into our lives amid the beauties and cruelties of our difficult world.

"In An Atlas of the Difficult World Rich says: 'We write from the marrow of our bones.' So she has written since the 1960s, saying what we longed to say, but could not, or dared not. She is a crucial poet: each volume more courageous, newly elegant. In this book she makes me, even in these harsh times, brave, toughened by her boldness, her skill."—Carolyn G. Heilbrun