Read in June 2011

1. Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991-1995, by Adrienne Rich

2. A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 1978-1981, by Adrienne Rich
Her younger work is much more accessible. This volume was a beautiful complement to the second-wave feminist essays and pamphlets I was reading around the same time. Intelligent, fluid, with plenty of righteous anger and grief. (I want to own it.)

3. To Bedlam and Part Way Back, by Anne Sexton

4. My Soviet Union: Poems, by Michael Dumanis

5. Tiger in the Well, by Philip Pullman
Reread. Engrossing YA Victorian mystery with a socialist flavoring. I love the protagonist, Sally Lockhart. It's the final in a trilogy; I wouldn't love her or enjoy it as much without having spent two books with her already. (The first is also very good; I didn't like the second that much.) My only gripe is that at times there is an intrusively modern, i.e. preachy, flavor to the liberalism.

6. Send Me Down a Miracle, by Han Nolan
Also reread. If I taught high school or middle school English, I would assign this. Really artful characterizations; resists being boiled down.

7. National Geographic: The Photographs, by The National Geographic Society