In these "Twenty-One Love Poems," Rich identifies her relationship to the atrocities and injustices that originate from the complex fact that she puts with such eloquent simplicity in poem 1: "No one has imagined us." All kinds of disabling self-conceptions issue from that enormity. By not officially existing, women who love women--whether as mothers and daughters, as sisters, as lesbians, or as colleagues and friends--have to struggle even to believe in the existence of their own love, let alone to live that love. "[F]ighting the temptation to make a career of pain" (VIII), women who love women must identify the injuries but refuse to be the injured party.

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From Jane Roberta Cooper, ed. Reading Adrienne Rich. (University of Michigan Press, 1984).