A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far by Adrienne Rich

She also edited Muriel Rukeyser's Selected Poems (Library of America, USA, 2004 Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2013). Most of her books are published by Norton.

In 2010, she was honoured with The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award.

In 2006, Rich was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. Adrienne Rich (19292012) was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major public intellectual of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her prose includes the essay collections On Lies, Secrets, and Silence Blood, Bread, and Poetry an influential essay, 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence', and the nonfiction book Of Woman Born, which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct. Rich’s other volumes of poetry include The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, An Atlas of the Difficult World, The School Among the Ruins, and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork. But her wild patiencethe phrase comes from another books title, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far meant she could not simply wait and hope that the rest of the country would someday join her. She was known for work on advocating the LGBTQ+ community. Rich knew well that her work was part of a longer historical arc. Her poems, often tackled themes of oppression and resistance and were heralded for their powerful and evocative language. Her constellation of honours includes a National Book Award for poetry for Tonight, No Poetry Will Serve, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1994, and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for Diving Into the Wreck. Adrienne Rich was a prominent feminist poet and activist in the 20th century. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose.

Widely read, widely anthologised, widely interviewed and widely taught, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals.

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far by Adrienne Rich