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I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

Adrienne Rich

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.
ADRIENNE RICH

Difficulty Fundamental Intellectual Men Patrivincialism Patrochialism Perceptual Real Sexism
I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alive Born Delight Extraneous Giving Offered
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
ADRIENNE RICH

Believe Choice Help Keep Language Life Move Paralysed Respect
Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
ADRIENNE RICH

Challenge Compensatory Freedom Intellectual Nonexclusionary Political Simply Structure Studies Women
I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
ADRIENNE RICH

Approve Cherish Children Choice Father Made Mind Wanted
In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
ADRIENNE RICH

Country Danger Present Tense
To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
ADRIENNE RICH

Home Scenery Suffer Suffering
If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
ADRIENNE RICH

Been Compared Elder Generation Teach Worship
When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
ADRIENNE RICH

Carpet Closely Look Multiple Threads Tiny Underside Unseen Weaver
A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cutting Enough Flesh Open Ripped Scar
Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
ADRIENNE RICH

Biology Ignorance Key Ourselves Powerlessness
A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
ADRIENNE RICH

Burn Desire Kill Living might Poem Remind Revolutionary Theorize Wick
Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.
ADRIENNE RICH

Since Time Week Wrap Years Missing Young
White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness.
ADRIENNE RICH

Claim Crime Grew Hate Passion Speech Try White
Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
ADRIENNE RICH

Able Anger Except Inward Nail Rusted Touch Women
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
ADRIENNE RICH

Back Carbon Coming Head Keep Know

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

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I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

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