Essential Essays

Resumen del libro

A career-spanning selection of the lucid, courageous, and boldly political prose of National Book Award winner Adrienne Rich.
Adrienne Rich was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major intellectual voice of her generation. Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of her most renowned essays into one volume, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice, her prophetic vision, and her revolutionary views on social justice. Rich's essays unite the political, personal, and poetical like no other.

Essential Essays is edited and includes an introduction by leading feminist scholar, literary critic, and poet Sandra M. Gilbert. Emphasizing Rich's lifelong intellectual engagement, the essays selected here range from the 1960s to 2008. The volume contains one of Rich's earliest essays, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, which discusses the need for female self-definition, along with excerpts from her ambitious, ground-breaking Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. As the New York Times wrote, Rich brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse, as evidenced in her 1980 essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.

Also among these insightful and forward-thinking works are: Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity ; excerpts from What Is Found There, about the need to reexamine the literary canon; Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts ; Poetry and the Forgotten Future ; and other writings that profoundly shaped second-wave feminism, each balanced by Rich's signature blend of research, theory, and self-reflection.

Biografía del autor

(Baltimore, 1929 - Santa Cruz, California, 2012) fue poeta, ensayista, académica, intelectual y una de las escritoras más influyentes del movimiento feminista. Rich recibió numerosas distinciones a lo largo de su carrera: el National Book Award de poesía, la beca Genius de la Fundación MacArthur, la Medalla de la Fundación Nacional del Libro por su Contribución a las Letras Estadounidenses y un Premio Griffin Trust por Excelencia en Poesía. A lo largo de seis décadas publicó una veintena de poemarios, y títulos de no ficción tan relevantes como Nacemos de mujer o Ensayos esenciales. En 1974, al ser galardonada con el National Book Award por el poemario que ahora presentamos, lo recibió en nombre de todas las mujeres cuyas voces aún no se han escuchado en un mundo patriarcal . En Sexto Piso publicamos El sueño de una lengua común (2019), que fue elegido como uno de los diez libros del año por Babelia.