An Atlas of the Difficult World was published by W.W. Norton in 1991 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The title sequence — thirteen sections mapping the American landscape from California to New England — is Rich’s most ambitious poetic achievement: an attempt to chart the country’s geography, its people, its failures, and its unrealized possibilities with the comprehensive ambition of Whitman’s Song of Myself and the political urgency of someone watching the Reagan-Bush era devastate the social fabric.
The poem addresses America directly: its landscapes (the Central Valley, the Eastern seaboard, the Rust Belt), its people (migrant workers, AIDS patients, homeless veterans, suburban women), and its contradictions (beauty coexisting with cruelty, democratic rhetoric masking oligarchy). Rich refuses both patriotic sentimentality and nihilistic rejection: she insists on loving the country while condemning what it has become — an act of political courage that requires maintaining two contradictory positions simultaneously.
The collection’s final poem ends with a litany addressed to the reader: “I know you are reading this poem… in a room where too much has happened for you to bear.” Rich’s late style — direct, inclusive, simultaneously personal and political — reaches full power here.
Collecting An Atlas of the Difficult World
First edition (W.W. Norton, New York, 1991): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40