Stephen Burt writes:

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve is a rough book, full of frayed connections, between Rich and other people, between Rich and America, between ways of thinking about poetry. It also looks back to earlier poems, among them ‘Orion’. Rich’s lesser early poems felt, as she has said, ‘like exercises . . . written out of technique and habit’. Now the lesser passages feel like notes from scrapbooks, to be expanded at some later date, and some of the best passages feel that way too./blockquote>

(LRB 9 February 2012)

Norton | Hardback 80 pp. |ISBN: 9780393079678