Adrienne Rich

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

The moment of change is the only poem.

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide?

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.