It is not that Adrienne Rich's later work is less good than her early poems - it is simply that they are less comfortable. These poems require the reader to sit with them, to hear their echo while looking in the mirror and then outward at their own world. In one, she asks, "If art is our only resistance, what does that make us" and in the next line uses the word collaborators. Her poems are not a cry to action, they have gone past that and achieved a kind of transcendent howl that calls to the humanity in each of us.