Look: with all my fear I'm here with you, trying what it means, to stand fast; what it means to move. In these astonishing new poems, Adrienne Rich dares to look and to extend her poetic language as witness to the treasures-the midnight salvage-we rescue from fear and fragmentation. Rich's work has long challenged social plausibilities built on violence and demoralizing power. In Midnight Salvage, she continues her explorations at the end of the century, trying, as she has said, to face the terrible with hope, in language as complex as necessary, as communicative as possible-a poetics which can work as antidote to complacency, self-involvement, and despair. I have wanted to assume a theater of voices rather than the restricted I. To write for both readers I know exist and those I can only imagine, finding their own salvaged beauty as I have found mine. In her vision of warning and her celebration of life, Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters.-Nadine Gordimer