Best Selling Books by Kristin Stoner

Adrienne Rich''s journey as a poet will be traced here through three stages, as a daughter, as a sister, and as a mother respectively. These stages will be examined through close readings of selected poetry collections as well as an examination of my own poetry. I chose what I considered to be some of Rich''s strongest and most influential collections: Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, The Will to Change, Diving into the Wreck, Dream of a Common Language, An Atlas of a Difficult World, Dark Fields of the Republic, and Fox. Rich''s movement through these stages, as well as my own development within the daughter stage, is evidence of the importance of these identities in a woman''s life, how they can define not only the way a woman views herself and the way in which others view her, but also the way she thinks and reacts to the world around her. As a daughter Rich develops her art through the imitation and rejection of other poets, father and mother figures, patriarchal figures, and, at the same time, reaches for literary and historical figures as role models. As a sister, Rich seeks connections to women outside the literary sphere, she addresses historical and ordinary women, identifies with them, and attempts to understand the common history they share (Ostriker 111). And, finally, Rich, as a literary mother, sees herself as a guide with the goal of illuminating and expanding her readers'' sense of possibilities through more strongly didactic texts, an emphasis on the past, and an examination of the mother/daughter and parent/child relationship. The three movements overlap, move fluidly into each other, evidence of each existing within the others.