This essay details the poet Adrienne Rich’s complex and stimulating coupling of urgency with joy in her poems of sensual and political address. Tejada reveals how Rich’s lyric poetry, by comprehending the grand misfortunes of the world, is also an incredibly persuasive endeavor to activate, or “prompt a double world—at once, still wanting and excessive to itself…” Rich’s language also gestures towards other historical archives—such as women documentary photographers—in this necessary and urgent critical essay on the preeminent feminist poet.
