Blood, Bread, and Poetry

December 1, 1986
Rich is the author of the prize-winning Your Native Land, Your Life and 12 other books of poems, yet these lucid, searching essays spring from her involvement since the early '70s with the feminist movement, and, where they touch on poetry, examine the social and political contexts of its making. In some of them Rich explores her complex identity as white, middle-class, Jewish, lesbian and American, and discusses her radicalization through the influence, largely, of Mary Wollstonecraft, James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir. In other pieces she assails "enforced heterosexuality'' and, as it obtains in academia as well as society at large, ``the ideology of white male supremacy.'' Rich, who visited the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, considers that the United States has been ``deep-frozen for decades in the Cold War,'' but believes that American feminism, and especially black American feminism, can do much to foster the movements for sexual and political freedom throughout the world.