"Built on her wildly popular Modern Love column, 'When a Couch is More Than a Couch' (9/23/2016), a breathtaking memoir of living meaningfully with 'death in the room' by the 38 year old great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, mother to two young boys, wife of 16 years, after her terminal cancer diagnosis"--

At nineteen Trethewey's world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma. Here she explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a 'child of miscegenation' in Mississippi,...

"Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair's father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman's highest virtue was her obedience. In an...

Patti Smith is a renowned singer, songwriter, poet and activist. Her music, poetry, and politics are fearless, funny, raw and original. Traces Patti's punk-poet roots through the trials of daily life and untimely deaths that have formed her life and art. Touches on her early days in New York City and includes the people dearest to her, her family, and the political causes she champions.

This volume explores the legacy of the works of American writer and poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). The author discusses how Plath's reputation was forged from the poems she wrote just before her suicide; how her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, as executor of her estate, tried to serve two masters - Plath's art and his own need for privacy; and how it fell to his sister, Olwyn Hughes, as literary agent for the estate, to protect him by limiting...

An in-depth exploration of the life and work of the great American poet Emily Dickinson.

"Pleasure-loving, sarcastic, stubborn, determined, erotic, deeply sad--Jane Kenyon's complexity and contradictions found expression in luminous poems that continue to attract a passionate following. Dana Greene draws on a wealth of personal correspondence and other newly available materials to delve into the origins, achievement, and legacy of Kenyon's poetry and separate the artist's life story from that of her husband, the award-winning poet Donald...