The New Republic

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THIS ESSENTIAL, CAREFULLY organized book tracks Adrienne Rich’s work from 1971 to 2012, the year of her death. The selections were chosen by Rich herself. The journey from the opening poems to the ghostly and unpublished testaments of her final years is therefore authoritatively mapped. READ MORE >>

Every Diwali, I explain to my friends at school why I am so tired—garba it’s like dancing—pujas? I guess like praying—  I explain in fragments because even we don’t know why we wash statues with milk, why worshipping God takes so many coats. I don’t ask,  just sit beside my mother when she sings. My sister and I watch our father struggle to cross his legs; his laughter resting on his lifted knees.  READ MORE >>

On long foot patrols we wanted the chickens, roasted and bronzed, hanging from the steel roofs of vendor stands, the Iraqi sun burning like a heat lamp. We had seen months  of Cobra cooking: teriyaki chicken the color of transmission fluid; mixed vegetables that broke like Styrofoam in the mouth; the mush of grits always cold. This changed, for a day, when LT Stanton—  a man who once suffered a week of the shits  after eating vanilla ice cream from little Mohammad, the ten-year-old town salesman—  READ MORE >>

You get used to it, she said, meaning the delicate mechanism of the diamond drop passed on from her mother. She was fastening the clasp around my neck, meaning preparing me for the fumbling that inheritance presents, meaning death. You get used to it, she said, meaning being inserted into the dark and learning to call it something else—the way of all flesh, for instance. It’s a box clasp: you slip a spring into a box-like feature, an 18th-century design modeled READ MORE >>

We played in the shadow Of murderers’ at work, Kneading soldiers out of mud, Stepping on them When we were done playing.  Girls walking the streets Gave us bread to eat. An old dog with a limp Kept us warm at night As we huddled in doorways.  My friends, my playmates, We never saw the dead, Only the birds scatter After we heard the gunshots And ducked our heads.  This poem appeared in the September 13, 2012 issue of the magazine.   READ MORE >>

Little brook, running past my house, I like the tune you hum to yourself When night comes, And only the two of us are awake. You keep me company So I don't fear The darkness round my bed And the thoughts in my head Flying crookedly like bats Between the old church and the graveyard. This poem appeared in the September 13, 2012 issue of the magazine. READ MORE >>

All we got, mister, Is an empty bowl and a spoon For you to slurp Great mouthfuls of nothing,  And make it sound like A thick, dark soup you’re eating, Steaming hot Out of the empty bowl. This poem appeared in the September 13, 2012 issue of the magazine. READ MORE >>

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A word drops into the mist like a child's ball into high grass where it remains intermittently visible, seductively flashing and glinting until the gold bursts are revealed to be simply field buttercups. Word/mist, word/mist—thus it was with me. And yet, my silence was never total— Like a curtain rising on a vista, sometimes the mist cleared: alas, the game was over. The game was over and the word had been somewhat flattened by the elements so it was now both recovered and useless.  READ MORE >>