The Dream of a Common Language
Adrienne Rich wrote this short collection at the height of her powers, opening with poems about women climbers on Lenin Peak and closing with the Twenty-One Love Poems, one of the most quoted sequences of late twentieth century American poetry. The book sets out to find a common language between women, between lovers, and between the self and the natural world. Rich moves from elegy to manifesto to address, refusing the line between political and personal. The poems are spare, urgent, and built for rereading. Strayed carried this book the entire length of the Pacific Crest Trail in Wild, burning pages as she finished them.
What you might want to know about The Dream of a Common Language
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Adrienne Rich's 1978 collection mapping language, love between women, and the climb toward a shared political life, including the Twenty-One Love Poems.
Strayed writes in Wild that she chose The Dream of a Common Language as the one book she could not leave behind, reading and rereading it for months and burning the pages as she finished each section to lighten her pack.
A sequence near the end of the book addressed to a woman lover. It is widely taught as one of the first openly lesbian love sequences in mainstream American poetry.
The Dream of a Common Language was written by Adrienne Rich, published in 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company.
The Dream of a Common Language is 96 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Dream of a Common Language takes most readers 1 to 2 hours to finish.
The Dream of a Common Language is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
