Reading Arts of the Possible will convince you (if you weren't already convinced) that Adrienne Rich is the kind of thinker who has long term relationships with her ideas.  Written over a span of three decades, the essays in this collection return again and again to a common set of questions and motifs that Rich has been grappling with for much of her writing life.  The interdependence between poetry and politics, art and community, the self and the outside world — these make up the strands in a years-long arc of conversation that coheres amazingly well.

What comes across most immediately, though, is the fact that Rich is first and foremost a poet — one who puts her poetic stamp on every paragraph.  As early as the Foreward, you can hear the music of her prose:

Our senses are currently whip-driven by a feverish new pace of technological change.  The activities that mark us as human, though, don't begin, exist in, or end by such a calculus.  They pulse, fade out, and pulse again in human tissue, human nerves, and in the elemental humus of memory, dreams, and art, where there are no bygone eras.  They are in us, they can speak to us, they can teach us if we desire it.

Rich says she wants writing to be "out there on the edge of meaning" but at the same time able to generate "lip-to-lip, spark-to-spark pleasure."  So at the same time that she juxtaposes the rapidity of technology and the dormancy of human flesh, she also juxtaposes the clipped, assonant compound "whip-driven" with the slow, deliberate repetitions of languid "p" and "f" sounds ("pulse, fade out, and pulse again"), and the slide between the soft word "human" into the softer "hummus."