Rest in Peace, Carolyn Kizer, 1924-2014

The Pulitzer Prize-Winning poet, Carolyn Kizer, has died at the age of 89. She passed away on Thursday in Sonoma, California, due to complications of dementia. Kizer is best known for her feminist views and her steely-wit. Her collection, Yin, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. In 1998, she and Maxine Kumin, chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, resigned to protest the lack of diversity within the organization's leadership. More from NY Times:

Carolyn Kizer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose verse, overtly political and bitingly satirical, came, as she fondly put it, with “a sting in the tail,” died on Thursday in Sonoma, Calif. She was 89.

The cause was complications of dementia, said the poet David Rigsbee, a friend and former student.

Ms. Kizer’s poetry is known for its wit, deep intellectualism and rigorous craftsmanship; its stylistic hallmarks include impeccably calibrated rhyme, near-rhyme and meter. It is unsentimental, at times unsettling, but also luminous and warm.

As a result of her painstaking way of working, and the length to which her poems could run, Ms. Kizer published fewer than a dozen collections in her lifetime. Composing, revising and assembling enough poems to fill a single volume could take a decade.[...]

Learn more at NY Times. If you're unfamiliar with Kizer's work, you can start with her poems "Where I've Been All My Life" and "October 1973" from our archive, and move on to Annie Finch's article "Visiting Carolyn Kizer."