Breaking open
"I consider Muriel Rukeyser by far the best poet of her exact generation.....She is an international rather than a provincial poet, and today she is a member of the contemporary generation because of her faithfulness and those qualities which are essential to real poetry at all times everywhere......'-Kenneth Rexroth. ".......She is a realist and celebrant of the spirit."-Richard Eberthart ".....She is able to speak of herself and the society she abhors as 'we' "-Poetry Magazine. "I've admired Muriel Rukeyser's poems for longer than I can say. She-not Sylvia Plath- is the mother of us all: the woman poet who dared to write out of her femaleness long before femaleness became fashionable. I love Breaking Open because it shows the wide range of Muriel Rukeyser's splendid gifts; humor, bawdiness, lyrical sweep, political commitment, compassion, great moral force. She is a brilliant craftswoman who can go from sonnets to prose-poems to rondels and black to rhythmic free verse- and have all of them bear her own unique cadence, her utterly individual sound. For all her political passion, Rukeyser always remembers the thingness of things and the humor of everyday interactions. Her prison poems are among the most powerful I have ever read, yet they never fall into abstraction or preaching. I finished this book with many of Muriel Rukeyser's lines echoing in my head, but the one that stays with me particularly and seems to sum up what Muriel Rukeyser's poetry has always meant to me is: 'my life is flying to your life.' What a flight Breaking Open is!"-Erica Jong "-Publisher
Print Book, English, 1973
First edition
Random House, New York, 1973