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Rich herself becomes a model survivor of many poets of second wave feminism. Her survival hinged on empathy: empathy with her own kind. For Rich, the exilic condition, which displaces, reconfigures, and fragments the self, is not only a trope, but also an asset; it gives one a perspective, a vantage point. And it makes for a certain fertile detachment and gives one new ways of seeing. Rich’s vision of intimacy can be understood as a way to combat epistemological alienation by gaining self-consciousness through a looking inward and outward that can assess one’s past, fears, and desires in relation to one’s private and public(social) longings. While exile is an actual condition, it can also be a metaphorical condition from which she develops an ethics of intimacy. Rich’s poetry collection Twenty-One Love Poems(1976) calls for cultivating an intimacy which breaks down barriers between private and public life. The subject of Twenty-One Love Poems is not the lesbian love shared by the lovers but the politics of their resistance in the patriarchal world. In repudiating a sequestered, safe private life disengaged from the world around her, Rich insists that achieving intimacy cannot happen behind the cloaks of racial, gendered, and economic privileges. (Kyungpook National University)