Selected poems

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80) published her first book--the powerfully experimental Theory of flight--at age twenty-two, and went on to an adventurous and prolific career as poet, translator, and political activist. Her expansive energies sought a poetry in which politics, geography, sexuality, mythology, and autobiography could find fused and fluid expression. From her early, cinematic "Poem out of childhood" through excerpts from her long wartime "Letter to the front" to her late "Resurrection of the right side," written after her stroke, this selection represents the many sides and selves of a major poet.