Adrienne Rich was, and remains, a popular poet: She won the Yale Younger Poets prize in her very early twenties, catapulting her into immediate fame in literary circles; in the 1960s and 70s her strong association with the women's movement greatly broadened her audience; and eventually her longevity and substantial body of excellent work garnered her poetry's highest honors and places on many a university syllabus. So it makes sense that this, the first full-length biography of Rich, would be written for a general (poetry-loving) audience rather than a scholarly one. Adrienne Rich had the blessing and curse of a long and interesting life, and Holladay mostly lets that life speak for itself in clear, direct, and blessedly nonfussy prose. There's none of the exhaustive explication of Rich's poetry that you'd find in a more academic biography, but Holladay does make an effort to link Rich's work (both poetry and prose) to what was happening in her life at the time—and those are exactly the sorts of connections fans of Rich's poetry might most look for and appreciate in a book like this.

I have a few reservations: First and foremost, Holladay too often falls back on words like "cold," "frosty," and "chilly" to describe Rich; at one point she describes Rich's anger as a "fit of pique." To be frank, language like this is generally used to describe women and serves to invalidate whatever they were feeling and going through at the moment; it's simplistic and inherently sexist. I expected better from a biographer of a feminist poet. What's more, there seems to be an inordinate focus on arguments Rich had with her friends. Rich lived for more than eight decades and it makes sense that not every friendship survived that entire time—to imply there's something iffy about Rich's character because she didn't hang on to every friend she'd ever made until death is unfair, particularly when Rich isn't here to tell her side of the story.

Still, despite this, I enjoyed <i>The Power of Adrienne Rich</i>. Like many literary biographies, it's on the long side, but my interest in it never flagged. Rich's long and varied life would, in and of itself, be fascinating to most of her admirers, and the fact that Holladay managed to preserve that fascination in this biography is more than enough reason to recommend it.

I received this ARC via NetGalley. Thank you to the publisher.