Adrienne 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 both for readers I know exist and those I can only imagine, finding their own salvaged beauty as I have found mine." These are risky poems, infused with the cruelty of history, the presence of the body, the beauty of the natural world, with human love and longing. In the course of these poems, Rich invokes the poet and Resistance fighter Rene Char and the photographer and revolutionary Tina Modotti and conjures Julia de Burgos, Hart Crane, and Miles Davis in an urban underworld.