Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems

edited by adrienne rich

from Theory of Flight (1935)

• Poem Out of Childhood
• Effort at Speech Between Two People
• Notes for a Poem
• Sand-Quarry with Moving Figures
• Three Sides of a Coin
• This House, This Country
• The Structure of the Plane
• Study in a Late Subway

• from The Book of the Dead
  • The Road
  • Statement: Philippa Allen
  • Gauley Bridge
  • The Disease
  • The Cornfield
  • The Dam
  • The Book of the Dead
• Girl at the Play
• Homage to Literature
• More of a Corpse Than a Woman
• Woman and Emblems

• First Elegy. Rotten Lake
• Third Elegy. The Fear of Form
• Fifth Elegy. A Turning Wind
• Reading Time     :     1 Minute 26 Seconds
• Tree of Days
• Paper Anniversary
• From the Duck-Pond to the Carousel
• Judith
• from Lives
  • Gibbs
  • Ann Burlak

• Ajanta
• Child in the Great Wood
• Darkness Music
• Drunken Girl
• The Minotaur
• Gift-Poem
• Leg in a Plaster Cast
• Bubble of Air
• from Letter to the Front
  • I. "Women and poets see the truth arrive"
  • IV. Sestina
  • VII. "To be a Jew in the twentieth century"
  • IX. "Among all the waste ..."

• Eyes of Night-Time
• Salamander
• Green Limits
• Foghorn in Horror
• Then I Saw What the Calling Was
• from Nine Poems for the Unborn Child
  • II. "They came to me and said ..."
  • VII. "You will enter the world ..."

• F.O.M.
• "Long Enough"
• Pouring Milk Away
• The Sixth Night     :     Waking

• Waterlily Fire

• The Poem as Mask: Orpheus
• The Conjugation of the Paramecium
• Double Dialogue
• Orgy
• What I See
• Gift
• Cries from Chiapas
• For My Son
• Poem
• The Power of Suicide
• Bunk Johnson Blowing
• What They Said
• The Backside of the Academy
• The Outer Banks
• Käthe Kollwitz

• Despisals
• Looking at Each Other
• Waiting for Icarus
• In Her Burning
• Myth
• A Simple Experiment
• Ballad of Orange and Grape
• From a Play: Publisher's Song

• St. Roach
• Painters
• Ms. Lot
• Resurrection of the Right Side
• The Wards
• Destruction of Grief
• Burnishing, Oakland

Biographical Note
Note on the Texts
Notes
Index of Titles and First Lines