From Booklist
*Starred Review* Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right in a collection of vigorous lyric poems about the first four years of the twenty-first century, a period of terror, war, corporate imperialism, outrageous lies, and miasmal inarticulateness. A moment in history, Rich avers, in arresting imagery and flinty syntax, in which language has been processed into banality just like so much of the American landscape. Forthright, precise, witty, and keenly attuned to complacency, reluctance, and fear, Rich fights back with exhilaratingly choreographed poems about inane, high-pitched public cell-phone conversations, television's numbing soundtrack, the crude oversimplification and commercialization of public discourse, and the "viral / spread of social impotence producing social silence." Rich also writes piercingly, and inevitably, of war, most poignantly in the powerful title poem, in which a courageous teacher in a besieged city tells his students, "Don't let your faces turn to stone / Don't stop asking me why." Similarly, Rich tells readers not to give up hope and not to remain silent, because truth flows unabated behind the facade of spin and babble, and it will prevail. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Library Journal
One of a handful of major American poets whose every new work is a cause for excitement.

Book Description
A new work by a distinguished poet. In this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem, in a young schoolteacher's voice, evokes the lessons that children ("Not of course here") learn amid violence and hatred, "when the whole town flinches / blood on the undersole thickening to glass." "Usonian Journals 2000" intercuts faces and conversations, building to a dystopic/utopic vision. Throughout these fierce and musical poems, Rich traces the imprint of a public crisis on individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account.

About the Author
Adrienne Rich is the recipient of numerous honors, most recently the 2003 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. She lives in northern California.

ANNOTATION

Winner of the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem evokes the lessons children (Not of course here) learn amid violence and hatred, when the whole town flinches/blood on the undersole thickening to glass. "USonian Journals 2000" intercuts faces and conversations, building to a dystopic/utopic vision. Throughout these fierce and musical poems, Rich traces the imprint of public crisis upon individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal