From Booklist
It's easy to see from this collection, which spans 1935-76, why many regarded elements of Rukeyser's work as beyond or before her time. By combining and recombining images of political leaders, body memory, physicists, sexuality, and more, the poet created a personal dreamscape, a cinema verit{‚}e full of jump cuts intersplicing poets, painters, and philosophers that presaged the age of MTV and poetry videos. Underpinning the densely worked surfaces, however, are the poet's recurrent musings on how and why we live, our relationships to ourselves, our physical bodies, the laws of gravity, the nature of fear, and the evolution of the poetic image. In "Letter to the Front" (from Beast in View, 1944), Rukeyser encapsulates her view of life as a woman, a Jew, and an artist: "The gift is torment. Not alone the still / Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh. / That may come also. But the accepting wish, / The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee / For every human freedom, suffering to be free, / Daring to live for the impossible." She constantly reminds us, "Exchange is creation." Whitney Scott
Muriel Rukeyser Reader FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In many ways," writes Adrienne Rich in her Introduction, "Muriel Rukeyser was beyond her time - and seems, at the edge of the twenty-first century, to have grasped resources we are only now beginning to reach for: the connections between history and the body, memory and politics, sexuality and public space, poetry and physical science, and much else. She spoke as a poet, first and foremost; but she spoke also as a thinking activist, biographer, traveler, explorer of her country's psychic geography." A Muriel Rukeyser Reader gathers a generous selection of poetry and prose spanning the forty-five years of Rukeyser's writing life. Bringing together works only sparsely anthologized or long out of print, this book is a resource for understanding the range, depth, and originality of this pioneering writer whom the poet Anne Sexton named "Muriel, mother of everyone."
Art & Photography
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