National Book Award-winning poet Adrienne Rich has passed away. She was 82 years old. Follow this Poetry Foundation link to read poems by the great author.

Over her long career, Rich (pictured, via Robert Giard) earned the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur genius grant. Maud Newton pointed us toward Rich’s poem, “For the Dead.” An excerpt:

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight

The National Book Award finalists were revealed today on the Think Out Loud radio show. We live blogged all the action. Below, we’ve linked to free samples of all the finalists.

Here’s more about the announcement: “The twenty Finalists for the 62nd National Book Awards will be announced on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s morning radio program, Think Out Loud, in front of a live audience at the new Literary Arts Center in Portland, Oregon.”

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After 27 years, Katha Pollitt will finally follow-up her debut collection poetry with a new new book of poems, “The Mind-Body Problem.”

Pollitt won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 1982 with her “Antarctic Traveller” book, but it took the author nearly three decades to finish this new collection. At Granta, critic Adam Gopnik interviewed Pollitt about writing and publishing in this new century.

Here’s an excerpt about political poetry in the age of Barack Obama: “There is not a lot of explicitly political poetry that I love. Berthold Brecht would be an exception … Adrienne Rich has written political poems that are original and profound, and others that seem to me not so interesting as writing. Mostly, I think that if you can say it in an article, or a leaflet, or a letter, or an email, then do so! It’s not going to make much of a poem.”