Adrienne Rich's collection Diving into the Wreck, published in New York in 1973 and awarded the National Book Award in 1974, stands as the most celebrated single volume of explicitly feminist poetry produced in the American twentieth century. Rich's poems explored the female body as a site of political struggle, mapping the wreckage left by patriarchy in women's physical and interior lives. The collection appeared at the height of second-wave feminism, just five years after the Miss America protest, and gave the movement its most sustained and profound poetic statement.

Diving into the Wreck is inseparable from the feminist critique of women's bodily confinement, including the traditions of corsetry and bra culture that second-wave feminism was challenging. Rich's vision of the body as a 'damaged' site requiring feminist archaeology connected to the long history of women poets writing against physical and social constraint. The collection remains a landmark of body-centred feminist poetics and is widely taught in the context of feminist literary history.