Rich’s approach to her religious identity was of a piece with her approach to every aspect of her identity. For Rich, any identity worth achieving involved struggle and resistance—be it national identity (“a patriot is one who wrestles for the / soul of her country / as she wrestles for her own being”), gender identity (“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. / The beak that grips her, she becomes.”), or the committed poet’s identity (“She cannot teach the end of bonds; but she can refuse to justify, accord with, ignore their existence”).
Ryan Harper
Ryan Harper is a graduate student in the department of religion at Princeton University, where he is completing an ethnography on contemporary southern gospel music. His essays and poems have appeared in The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Books and Culture, Sugar House Review, Potomac Review, The Other Journal, and elsewhere. Ryan lives in New Jersey with his spouse, writer and chaplain Lynn Casteel Harper.
