Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

RICH, Adrienne

ISBN 10: 0393050459 / ISBN 13: 9780393050455

Published by W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2001

About this Item

8vo. Pale blue cloth spine with silver lettering and blue paper over boards, pictorial dust jacket. 190pp. Fine/fine. Front pastedown ownership signature; binding reversed (publisher's error as issued). A tight, handsome first edition of the renowned poet's essays.

Seller Inventory # 46033

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company, New York
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393050459
• ISBN 13: 9780393050455
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Literary Criticism
  • Books

About this title

Synopsis

These essays trace a distinguished writer's engagement with her time, her arguments with herself and others.

"I am a poet who knows the social power of poetry, a United States citizen who knows herself irrevocably tangled in her society's hopes, arrogance, and despair," Adrienne Rich writes.

The essays in Arts of the Possible search for possibilities beyond a compromised, degraded system, seeking to imagine something else. They call on the fluidity of the imagination, from poetic vision to social justice, from the badlands of political demoralization to an art that might wound, that may open scars when engaged in its work, but will finally suture and not tear apart.

This volume collects Rich's essays from the last decade of the twentieth century, including four earlier essays, as well as several conversations that go further than the usual interview. Also included is her essay explaining her reasons for declining the National Medal for the Arts.

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.