Author Guide · Poetry & Essays
Books Written by
On 18 April 1974, at Alice Tully Hall in New York, Adrienne Rich went up to accept the National Book Award for poetry with Audre Lorde beside her. She read a statement written with Lorde and Alice Walker, both also nominated, refusing “the terms of patriarchal competition” and accepting the prize on behalf of all women. Twenty-three years earlier, as a Radcliffe senior of 21, she had been picked by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets with neat, rhymed poems. Between the two lie a marriage, three sons, the civil rights and antiwar movements, and a complete change in how she wrote. This guide covers her thirteen key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 13 key books · 1951–2016 · Updated October 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book below.
Quick answer
Adrienne Rich published more than 30 books of poetry and prose between 1951 and 2011. Her best-known are Diving into the Wreck (1973), which won the National Book Award, The Dream of a Common Language (1978), with its “Twenty-One Love Poems”, and the prose study Of Woman Born (1976). Start with Diving into the Wreck; below you will find which book to read next depending on whether you want the poems, the essays or the whole arc.
Where to Start with Adrienne Rich
If you want her defining collection
→ Diving into the Wreck (1973) — the 1973 book that won the National Book Award.
If you want her love poems
→ The Dream of a Common Language (1978) — including “Twenty-One Love Poems”.
If you want her prose
→ Of Woman Born (1976) — motherhood as experience and as institution.
If you want to see the whole arc at once
→ Collected Poems (2016) — six decades of poems in one volume.
13 Adrienne Rich Books, in Order
A Change of World
Her first collection, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets while she was a senior at Radcliffe; Auden wrote the introduction. The poems are formally exact and rhymed, modelled on the male poets she had studied, which is why later readers treat the book as the starting point of her change.
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law
Written while she was raising three young sons, the book is where she began to write about a woman’s own experience. The ten-part title poem, a dramatic monologue, moves through images of women caught between domestic duty and a mind of their own. Her lines loosen here and the dated, notebook-like poems point to the work that followed.
The Will to Change
Poems from the years after her move to New York in 1966, when she joined civil rights and antiwar campaigns, and from the period in which her marriage ended. It includes “Planetarium”, written about the astronomer Caroline Herschel and other women who studied the sky, which ends with the speaker as “an instrument in the shape / of a woman”.
Diving into the Wreck
In the title poem a diver loads a camera, checks the edge of a knife, puts on a rubber suit and goes down alone to explore a wreck: “the wreck and not the story of the wreck”, a figure for women’s buried history. Other poems include “The Phenomenology of Anger” and “From the Prison House”. It shared the 1974 National Book Award for poetry with Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America, and Rich accepted it on behalf of all women.
Of Woman Born
Her first prose book separates two things: motherhood as women live it, with their bodies and their children, and motherhood as an institution controlled by men. She draws on history, anthropology, psychology and literature, and on her own journals from the years when her sons were small. It was controversial on publication and is still read as a founding text of feminist writing on mothering.
The Dream of a Common Language
Her first collection after she came out as a lesbian in 1976. It has three parts: “Power”, which opens with a poem on Marie Curie; the sequence “Twenty-One Love Poems”, written to a woman lover in the middle of ordinary city life; and “Not Somewhere Else, but Here”, which ends with “Transcendental Etude”. It also contains “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev”, spoken by the leader of a women’s climbing team that died on a Soviet mountain in 1974.
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence
Her first essay collection, gathering lectures, reviews and articles from twelve years. It includes “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”, her essay on reading old texts with new eyes as a woman writer, alongside pieces on Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Brontë and women’s education.
Your Native Land, Your Life
The collection in which she turns to the Jewish heritage of her father, which she had grown up being taught to keep quiet about. It opens with the long sequence “Sources”, first published on its own in 1983, in which she looks back at her father, her family and her own upbringing.
Blood, Bread, and Poetry
Her second essay collection. It reprints “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, first published in the journal Signs in 1980, which introduced the idea of a “lesbian continuum”, and “Notes Toward a Politics of Location”, given as a keynote in Utrecht in 1984, about starting from one’s own body and history. “Split at the Root” (1982), on her Jewish identity, is here too.
An Atlas of the Difficult World
Her thirteenth book of poems, named for its thirteen-part title sequence, a map of the United States through the lives of people at its edges. It was a National Book Award finalist and won prizes from the Los Angeles Times, The Nation and the Poetry Society of America, as well as the Poets’ Prize. The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust calls it perhaps the best-known work of her late career.
What Is Found There
A book of prose in notebook form about what poetry is for in a country at odds with itself. She mixes readings of other poets with notes on American life and politics, written in California, where she had lived since 1984.
The School Among the Ruins
Poems written in the first years of the war on terror, many of them prose-like pieces in open forms about exile, modern life and the effects of war. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.
Collected Poems
Published four years after her death, the single volume brings together every collection from A Change of World to Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2011). It was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, cited “for a musically crafted life’s work that remains as boldly relevant today as when it was written.”
In What Order to Read Adrienne Rich
Rich dated almost every poem and gave most collections the years they cover in the subtitle, so publication order is the story of her development: from the formal early books, through the political and feminist poems of the late 1960s and 1970s, to the wider American poems of her last decades. Reading in order shows each step of that change.
You do not need to start at the beginning, though. Diving into the Wreck is the usual entry point. Read the essays alongside the poems of the same years: Of Woman Born and On Lies, Secrets, and Silence next to The Dream of a Common Language, and Blood, Bread, and Poetry next to Your Native Land, Your Life.
A reading path
1. Diving into the Wreck (1973)
2. The Dream of a Common Language (1978)
3. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979)
4. An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)
5. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963)
Everything Else Adrienne Rich Published
Beyond the 13 key books: 21 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other poetry collections
12
12 books · 1955–2011
- 1955The Diamond Cutters, and Other Poemsher second book, still in strict forms
- 1966Necessities of Lifepoems 1962–1965
- 1969Leafletspoems 1965–1968
- 1976Twenty-One Love Poemsthe sequence first printed on its own, later in The Dream of a Common Language
- 1981A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Farpoems 1978–1981
- 1983Sourcesthe sequence later opening Your Native Land, Your Life
- 1989Time’s Powerpoems 1985–1988
- 1995Dark Fields of the Republicpoems 1991–1995
- 1999Midnight Salvagepoems 1995–1998
- 2001Foxpoems 1998–2000
- 2007Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinthpoems 2004–2006
- 2011Tonight No Poetry Will Servepoems 2007–2010, her last collection
Selected and collected poems
5
5 books · 1967–2013
- 1967Selected Poemsher first selection
- 1975Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974
- 1984The Fact of a Doorframepoems selected and new, 1950–1984
- 1993Collected Early Poems, 1950–1970
- 2013Later Poemsselected and new, 1971–2012
Other prose
4
4 books · 2001–2018
- 2001Arts of the Possibleessays and conversations
- 2007Poetry and Commitmenta single essay
- 2009A Human Eyeessays on art in society, 1997–2008
- 2018Essential Essaysculture, politics and the art of poetry
The years · 1929–2012
Quick facts about Adrienne Rich
- Known for
- She moved from the polished formal verse of her twenties to openly political, feminist and lesbian poetry, and was one of the most influential American poets and essayists of the women’s movement
- 1929
- Born in Baltimore, Maryland
- 1951
- Auden picks A Change of World for the Yale series
- 1984
- Moves to California
- 1997
- Refuses the National Medal of Arts
- 2012
- Dies in Santa Cruz, California
- Born
- 16 May 1929, Baltimore, Maryland
- Education
- Radcliffe College, 1951
- Family
- Married the economist Alfred H. Conrad in 1953; three sons. Conrad died in 1970, after they separated
- Partner
- The Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff, from 1976 until Rich’s death
- Honours
- National Book Award (1974), MacArthur Fellowship (1994), Bollingen Prize (2003)
- Refused
- The National Medal of Arts, in 1997
- Died
- 27 March 2012, Santa Cruz, California, aged 82
The red mark is 1973: Diving into the Wreck, the collection that won the National Book Award.
How Adrienne Rich Writes: Re-Vision
Rich started inside the tradition. Her first two books use rhyme, regular metre and the measured tone of the poets she had read at Radcliffe; Randall Jarrell compared the poet behind them to “a sort of princess in a fairy tale.” From Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law onwards the lines loosen into free verse, poems are dated like journal entries, and the subject becomes the speaker’s own life as a woman.
Her key idea is what she called “re-vision” in the 1971 essay “When We Dead Awaken”: looking back at old texts, myths and histories from a new critical direction. “Diving into the Wreck” puts the idea into a single image, a diver going down to see the damage for herself rather than trust “the book of myths / in which / our names do not appear.” The same move runs through her prose, from motherhood in Of Woman Born to sexuality in “Compulsory Heterosexuality”.
She never kept poems and politics apart. War, race, Jewish identity, poverty and America itself enter the later books as directly as love does in “Twenty-One Love Poems”, and her prizes and refusals were public acts too. Some critics found the later work too didactic; her admirers read it as the point. W. S. Merwin said: “All her life she has been in love with the hope of telling utter truth.”
Frequently asked questions about Adrienne Rich’s books
How many books has Adrienne Rich written?
More than 30. This page covers 13 key books, from A Change of World (1951) to Collected Poems: 1950–2012 (2016), and lists 21 more below: twelve other poetry collections, five selections and four further prose books. Her last new collection was Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2011).
What are Adrienne Rich’s books in order?
The key books are A Change of World (1951), Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Will to Change (1971), Diving into the Wreck (1973), Of Woman Born (1976), The Dream of a Common Language (1978), On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979), Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), What Is Found There (1993), The School Among the Ruins (2004) and Collected Poems: 1950–2012 (2016).
Where should I start with Adrienne Rich?
Diving into the Wreck (1973), the collection that won the National Book Award and contains her best-known poem. If you prefer prose, start with Of Woman Born (1976) or the essay “When We Dead Awaken” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.
What is Adrienne Rich’s most famous book?
Diving into the Wreck (1973). Its title poem is her most anthologised work. Her most famous prose book is Of Woman Born (1976), and her most famous essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980).
Why did Adrienne Rich refuse the National Book Award?
She did not refuse the 1974 award outright, but she refused to accept it for herself alone. The prize was shared with Allen Ginsberg, and Rich read a statement written with fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, saying that “none of us could accept this money for herself” and accepting it on behalf of all women.
Why did Adrienne Rich turn down the National Medal of Arts?
In 1997 she declined the medal in protest at the House vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and at the Clinton administration’s policies. She wrote that she “could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House”.
What is “Twenty-One Love Poems”?
A sequence of love poems from one woman to another, first printed as a small book in 1976 and then collected in The Dream of a Common Language (1978). It was among the first openly lesbian love poems by a major American poet, and Rich came out publicly in the same year.
Was Adrienne Rich criticised for her views on trans women?
Yes. Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire (1979), widely criticised as anti-trans, thanked Rich for her “constant encouragement”, and LGBT and feminist writers have criticised Rich for that support, which she never explicitly withdrew. Leslie Feinberg, on the other hand, said Rich was supportive when Feinberg was writing Transgender Warriors.
Did Adrienne Rich win the Pulitzer Prize?
No. Her Collected Poems: 1950–2012 was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2017, five years after her death. Her major prizes were the National Book Award (1974), the National Book Critics Circle Award for The School Among the Ruins, a MacArthur Fellowship (1994) and the Bollingen Prize (2003).
Is Adrienne Rich still alive?
No. She died at her home in Santa Cruz, California, on 27 March 2012, aged 82; her son Pablo Conrad said the cause was long-term rheumatoid arthritis.
Footnotes
- Adrienne Rich — Wikipedia
- Adrienne Rich — Academy of American Poets
- Adrienne Rich — Poetry Foundation
- When Adrienne Rich refused the National Book Award — Literary Hub
- Collected Poems: 1950–2012, finalist — The Pulitzer Prizes
- Adrienne Rich, poet of change — The American Prospect, 2012
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I am an instrument in the shape / of a woman trying to translate pulsations / into images for the relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind.”
— Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium”, The Will to Change (1971)
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations