Kestrel Sparhawk

When I was young and learning to write, Rich became my role model because everyone told me, "political poetry is bad poetry," and Rich clearly was political and a brilliant poet. This collection comes at the height of the second wave, and is in that way a chronicle of feminist ideas as well as Rich's personal transformation from the Boys' Best Girl Poet to a Feminist Poet whose abilities and awards as a token woman in the previously all-male academia canon (the others tended to kill themselves before being given a place). They became so much a part of my life and my growing up that she's still my model for one of the all-time great writers of the 20th century. (For comparison, the others remain male: Auden, Yeats, and Eliot.)