Essential Essays and Selected Poems by Adrienne Rich

Sometimes type is all you need: Yang Kim’s jacket design for Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry by Adrienne Rich prominently features the vigorous stencil letterforms from Dala Moa Bold. The small line at the bottom is set in caps from the rarely seen Neutraface Condensed.

This selection of Adrienne Rich’s prose, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert, includes sections of her 1978 book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience & Institution; from What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry & Politics and important critical essays reflecting on Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, her letter on “Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts”; “When We Dead Awaken”; and “Compulsory Heterosexuality & Lesbian Existence.” As Sandra M. Gilbert writes in her introduction, “To re-read and to re-think Rich’s prose as a complete oeuvre is to encounter a major public intellectual — responsible, self-questioning, and morally passionate.”

Published by W. W. Norton & Company.