LAST MARCH, WHEN ADRIENNE RICH DIED, tributes poured out across every platform and medium. I sorrowed with the poets, shared the gratitude of the feminists, and felt, with the lesbians, the loss of someone I’d never met who nonetheless felt like family. After a while, I started to feel an unspoken connection I had noticed subliminally but had never quite put together until I started to steep myself in others’ assessments of Rich’s life and times: the unacknowledged history of how poets — often lesbians, often women of color — helped create the bedrock of contemporary feminist theory.

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